A review of the relationships and impact of market orientation and market positioning on organisational performance

Abstract

The debate concerning the importance of adopting a market orientation in collaboration with market positioning strategies has gone on for years. Nevertheless, on their own, market orientation and market positioning do not guarantee profitable firm performance unless marketers employ and integrate both on a long-term basis. Achieving this synergy is somewhat problematic owing to focus on short-term operational exigency, as well as the lack of research identifying the relationship between the two concepts. This review fills the gap in the literature by answering two questions: What is the relationship between firm market orientation capability and firm market positioning strategies? How does this relationship impact the performance of organisations? The article sheds light on these issues and contributes to the debate by proposing relationships between positioning strategy and market orientation. Furthermore, the researchers propose how positioning mediates the relationship between market orientation and business benefits.

Market orientation and corporate social responsibility: towards an integrated conceptual framework

“…This calls for scholars in marketing to research into the factors that can influence MO and CSR simultaneously in an organisational setting. In this competitive era firms cannot survive on a single strategy (Grinstein 2008;Brik et al 2011;Mitchell et al 2010;Blankson et al 2013;Han et al 2013). This phenomenon is encouraging firms to integrate economic and social strategies in contemporary times in the business environment.…”

Investigating market orientation and positioning in star-rated hotels in Ghana

“…This definition has been used by previous researchers (Langerak, 2003;Agarwal et al, 2003;Sørensen, 2009;Mitchell et al, 2010). The Narver and Slater perspective is adopted for this study because market orientation has been theorized in terms of behaviors and captures the main aspects of Kohli and Jaworski's conceptualization (Hooley et al, 2003;Blankson et al, 2013).…”

“…The market orientation construct is central to modern marketing decision-making and a frequently studied subject (Grinstein, 2008;Qu, 2009;Blankson et al, 2013;Mahmoud, 2016). There is a continuous interest in market orientation owing to the firm performance and market orientation nexus (Qu, 2009;Wang et al, 2012;Mahmoud, 2016).…”

“…Positioning is the proactive, deliberate and iterative utilization of market-oriented strategies that modify consumers' perceptions about a hotel's offering . Studies on positioning have focused on positioning strategies, the effectiveness of positioning strategies, the impact of positioning on performance, the link between positioning strategies and market orientation and their joint effect on business performance (Blankson and Kalafatis, 2007;Blankson and Crawford, 2012;Blankson et al, 2013). A review of the extant literature proposes that only few publications have studied the combination of market orientation and other strategic orientation relationships (Grinstein, 2008).…”

“…The importance of using market orientation and positioning strategies for improved firm performance has been fairly well acknowledged (cf. Hooley et al, 2004;Blankson et al, 2013) in the literature.…”