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This study examines the association between market orientation and company profitability. It incorporates two methodological approaches that have generally not been used in previous research. First, it uses lagged company and environmental control variables in the data analysis, to better discern their effects on profitability and, hence, clarify any relationship between market orientation and perfor Mance. Second, it analyses the individual components of market orientation and their relationships with business profitability separately. The study finds that, of the components of a market orientation, a competitor orientation emerges as the variable with the strongest association with perfor Mance. This association is robust in two models, one with solely cross‐sectional data, and the other with lagged control variables. In simple terms, the strongest distinguishing feature of high‐profit firms in this study is that they are very attuned to the activities and characteristics of competitors. For managers, this reinforces the view that while a customer orientation is vital, competitor intelligence activities may also be a key factor in ensuring high perfor Mance. The implication for researchers is that each component of market orientation should not necessarily be assumed to have equally strong associations with profitability.

The pace of online shopping revenue growth means it is important for retailers and manufacturers to understand how consumers behave online compared with their behaviour in brick and mortar stores. We conducted a study in which the detailed behaviour of 40 shoppers was screen recorded while they each undertook an online shopping 'trip'. The shopping trip comprised purchasing a basket of 12 commonly bought grocery categories at one of two major retailers. The shoppers were all inexperienced in online grocery shopping. Results show that online grocery shopping is fast, even for these consumers who were new to it -half of the online shoppers spent less than 10 seconds purchasing from a category. This result is very similar to that of past studies in physical stores. Indeed, half of all the 12 item-shopping trips took less than 10 minutes. Also, most purchases were made from the first category page displayed in the retailer's online store. Shoppers also consistently used the default display options chosen by the retailers but used a combination of navigational tools to find their products. We conclude that online shoppers do not behave differently from those offline in terms of time spent or effort expended. Online shopping, in the grocery context at least, seems to primarily reflect a desire for time efficiency on the part of the shopper. In that regard, online shopping seems very similar to in-store shopping. The study begins the job of documenting shopper behaviour into this new channel and provides practical knowledge for retailers and manufacturers.

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