The Relative Advantage of Marketing over Technological Capabilities in Influencing New Product Performance: The Moderating Role of Country Institutions

Abstract

Marketing and technological capabilities are major drivers of new product performance. Prior research has suggested that marketing capabilities outperform technological capabilities. This study shows that the relative advantage of marketing over technological capabilities for new product performance depends on the institutional context in a country. Meta-analytic data of 341 effect sizes of the relationship between capabilities and new product performance taken from 50 articles with 57 independent samples and collected in 17 different countries reveal new contingencies to the capabilities framework. Although in general, marketing capabilities have a stronger influence than technological capabilities on new product performance, this effect is moderated by institutional context factors. The relative advantage decreases and even reverses with increasing growth rates; it further decreases with increasingly stronger rules of law in a country; and it increases in societies that put emphasis on self-expression values over survival values. These findings contribute to research on the utility of different capabilities, inform the institution-based view of firms in international marketing, and provide implications for international marketing managers.

Internationalizing-Innovation Profiles and High-Technology Exports: Does Lone Genius Matter?

“…Our finding that innovation experience moderates a country's ability to deploy innovation resources into external markets also adds value to the literature. Whereas recent research has demonstrated the importance of considering the impact of resources and capabilities across countries (e.g., Eisend, Evanschitzky, and Calantone 2016), our findings highlight not just the existence of differences across countries but also the dynamic nature of these country-level resources and their potential for growth. We posit that this substantiates the theoretical claims regarding the “complexity of context” in international marketing (Akaka, Vargo, and Lusch 2013).…”

Importer and exporter capabilities, governance mechanisms, and environmental factors determining customer-perceived relationship value

“…Research findings indicate that marketing capabilities generally outperform other capabilities such as R&D, operations or technological ones in explaining business performance (e.g., Eisend, Evanschitzky, & Calantone, 2016;Krasnikov & Jayachandran, 2008). Likewise, during our interviews, managers repeatedly extolled the merits of superior market knowledge and effective management of customer interactions.…”

Managerial Social Networks and Innovation: A Meta‐Analysis of Bonding and Bridging Effects across Institutional Environments

“…To control for differences in the size of the country's economy, which could influence innovation as larger economies may be more beneficial for innovation (Saeed et al, ), this research followed prior research (Marano et al, ) and included the total GDP (in billions, purchasing power parity) of the country provided by the World Bank. This study also controlled for the dynamic of the economic development as prior research has shown that it might affect innovation (Eisend, Evanschitzky, and Calantone, ) through the annual GDP growth (in %) of the underlying country (World Bank). Moreover, to account for differences in the innovation measure , a dummy variable was included which assesses whether a study used innovation output (0) or input indicators (1) .…”

“…Tables 2a and 2b will show the correlation matrices used for the meta-regressions. Some of the correlations between the institutional environments are very high (e.g., rule of law and political stability), which is quite common in primary empirical studies (e.g., Batjargal et al, 2013) as well as in metaanalyses examining the influence of institutional factors (Eisend, Evanschitzky, and Gilliland, 2016;Eisend, Evanschitzky, and Calantone, 2016;Mueller et al, 2013;Saeed et al, 2014). As this may lead to potential multicollinearity problems, this research followed prior meta-analyses (e.g., Mueller et al, 2013) and investigated the influence of the institutional moderator variables in single models (Model 2-6) as shown in Tables 3a and 3b.…”