Measuring Market Orientation in an Export Context: Some Preliminary Evidence

Abstract

While the relationship between market orientation and business performance has long been an accepted tenet of marketing thought (for example, Felton, 1959; Levitt, 1960; Kotler, 1977; Webster, 1988), until very recently no valid measure of market orientation existed to enable empirical testing of this relationship. However, in the past five years, several instruments have been developed which claim to tap the market orientation construct (for example, Narver and Slater, 1990; Ruekert, 1992; Deshpandé et al., 1993; Jaworski and Kohli, 1993; Deng and Dart, 1994). These instruments have been found to be positively related to a variety of business performance indicators, such as sales volume, growth in sales revenue, return on assets, business unit profitability, market share, new product success, and composite measures of company performance (for example, Narver and Slater, 1990; Ruekert, 1992; Deshpandé et al., 1993; Jaworski and Kohli, 1993; Narver et al., 1993; Avlonitis et al., 1994; Deng and Dart, 1994; Oosthuizen, 1994; Slater and Narver, 1994; Caruana et al., 1995; Greenley, 1995a; see also Siguaw et al., 1994).