Strategic Orientation and Firm Performance in an Artistic Environment

Abstract

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that a customer orientation provides a firm with a better understanding of its customers, which subsequently leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and firm performance. However, there are cautions that being too customer focused can lead to inertia, and anecdotal evidence suggests that it may be better to "ignore your customer" when developing new products. Building on the market orientation research stream, the authors examine the impact of three alternative strategic orientations-customer orientation, competitor orientation, and product orientation-on a variety of subjective and objective measures of performance in the nonprofit professional theater industry, which is marked by high rates of artistic innovation and largely unpredictable customer preferences. The results indicate that the association between strategic orientation and performance varies depending on the type of performance measure used. However, the most unambiguous result is that a customer orientation exhibits a negative association with subscriber ticket sales, total income, and net surplus/deficit.

When Does Medici Hurt Da Vinci? Mitigating the Signaling Effect of Extraneous Stakeholder Relationships in the Field of Cultural Production

“…Some creative industries may have international audiences, but the survival and development of their constitutive professional organizations -e.g. museums (Alexander, 1996), theaters (Voss & Voss, 2000), and philharmonic orchestras (Durand & Kremp, 2015) -remain highly dependent on and constrained by national socio-political and economic arrangements. To conduct our research, we needed a creative industry with many comparable actors, with well-established, salient and sedimentary professional norms and with a high degree of exposure to a national cultural policy.…”

“…This friction is fueled by the fact corporate interests are traditionally despised by the intellectual and cultural elite of Russia. Only a limited amount of management research has looked at the theater industry outside the empirical work by Glenn and Zannie Voss (among which Voss & Voss, 2000or Voss et al, 2008 our study however takes a more macro approach to this field, which makes our peculiar national context an asset.…”

Market Orientation and the Performance of Small and Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprises in the Accra Metropolis

“…For example, over the previous 17 years, various researchers (Appiah-Adu, 1997) have examined the effects of MO on firm performance, advocating positive (Kumar, Subramanian, & Yauger, 1998), negative (Voss & Voss, 2000), and nonsignificant findings (Greenley, 1995). Even though Rodriguez-Cano, Carrillat and Jaramillo (2004) supported a positive relationship between MO and enterprise performance in their meta-analysis, other reviews (e.g., Langerak, 2003) have culminated in inconclusive results, suggesting that the relationships are not so straight forward (Olavarrieta & Friedmann, 2008).…”

The Influences of Company Characteristics, Entrepreneurship Behavior and Bank Relationship Toward Small and Medium Enterprises (Smes) Performance

“…The study conducted by Voss and Voss (2000) revealed that there is correlation between subjective and objective performance measurement. It means that the company performance can be measured by using a subjective measurement.…”