Does market orientation impede breakthrough innovation? To date, researchers have presented opposing arguments with respect to this important issue. To address this controversy, the authors conceptualize and empirically test a model that links different types of strategic orientations and market forces, through organizational learning, to breakthrough innovations and firm performance. The results show that a market orientation facilitates innovations that use advanced technology and offer greater benefits to mainstream customers (i.e., technology-based innovations) but inhibits innovations that target emerging market segments (i.e., market-based innovations). A technology orientation is beneficial to technology-based innovations but has no impact on market-based innovations, and an entrepreneurial orientation facilitates both types of breakthroughs. Different market forces (demand uncertainty, technology turbulence, and competitive intensity) exert significant influence on technology- and market-based innovations, and these two types of innovations affect firm performance differently. The results have significant implications for firm strategies to facilitate product innovations and achieve competitive advantages.

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The authors extend consumer satisfaction literature by theoretically and empirically (1) examining the effect of perceived performance using a model first proposed by Churchill and Surprenant, (2) investigating how alternative conceptualizations of comparison standards and disconfirmation capture the satisfaction formation process, and (3) exploring possible multiple comparison processes in satisfaction formation. Results of a laboratory experiment suggest that perceived performance exerts direct significant influence on satisfaction in addition to those influences from expected performance and subjective disconfirmation. Expectation and subjective disconfirmation seem to be the best conceptualizations in capturing satisfaction formation. The results suggest multiple comparison processes in satisfaction formation.

This study extends the existing satisfaction-trust-loyalty paradigm to investigate how customers' affectionate ties with firms (customer-firm affection)-in particular, the components of intimacy and passion-affect customer loyalty in services. In a bilevel model, the authors consider customer-staff and customer-firm interactions in parallel. Through a netnography study and survey research in two service contexts, they confirm (1) the salience of intimacy and passion as two underrecognized components of customer-firm affection that influence customer loyalty, (2) the complementary and mediating role of customer-firm affection in strengthening customer loyalty, (3) significant affect transfers from the customer-staff to the customer-firm level, and (4) the dilemma that emerges when customer-staff relationships are too close. The findings provide several implications for researchers and managers regarding how intimacy and passion can enrich customer service interactions and how to manage customer-staff relationships properly.

Guanxi refers to the durable social connections and networks a firm uses to exchange favors for organizational purposes. This study examines how and when guanxi operates as a governance mechanism that influences firm marketing competence and performance in the transitional economy of China. Drawing on social capital theory, the authors propose an integrative framework that unbundles the benefits and risks of guanxi and delineates the organizational processes to internalize guanxi as a corporate core competence. The authors surveyed senior executives in 282 firms in China's consumer products industries. The findings confirm guanxi's direct effects on market performance and its indirect effects mediated through channel capability and responsive capability. The authors also confirm that technological turbulence and competition intensity can be effective structure-loosening forces, thus reducing the governance effects of guanxi. The findings suggest that firms can improve market access and growth through guanxi networks, but managers need to capitalize on them from the personal to the corporate level. In addition, managers should be aware of guanxi's dark sides, which include reciprocal obligations and collective blindness. This study shows that personal networks are popular universally, but in China, they have unique, distinct ways of operation.