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Proactive customer orientation and its role for creating customer value in global markets

  • Original Empirical Research
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Abstract

Today’s business customers expect sellers not only to respond effectively to their expressed needs but also to understand their business sufficiently well to proactively address their latent and future needs. Yet, research shows that many firms underestimate, misunderstand, or overlook these customer expectations. To draw clarity to this discrepancy, this study explores the notion of proactive customer orientation and examines the degree to which this capability offers an opportunity for competitive advantage. While research in recent years has explored the role of proactive customer orientation in new product performance, empirical investigation in this stream of market orientation literature is significantly underdeveloped. We assess the impact of the proactive customer orientation construct on value creation by taking a novel approach that examines the proactive customer orientation → value → satisfaction → loyalty chain using data from 800 business customers in India, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that, relative to other firm capabilities, proactive customer orientation is the most consistent driver of customer value across our multinational data set. Results also show robust effects for the interaction of proactive and responsive customer orientation to create superior value. Several moderating conditions further frame the impact of this capability: intense levels of customer value change, a global relationship scope, and a transnational relationship structure. Overall, findings significantly advance the understanding of the proactive dimension within market orientation and provide marketers with insights for voice of the customer processes.

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Notes

  1. Narver et al. (2004) specify proactive and responsive market orientations as two forms of market orientation. However, the constructs they measure deal only with identifying and satisfying customers’ needs and do not encompass the other traditional dimensions of a market orientation. Thus, in the interest of being more precise we utilize the terms proactive customer orientation and responsive customer orientation.

  2. Similar to other researchers, we use the terms firm resources, capabilities, and value drivers interchangeably depending on a reference to the seller or customer organization context. Within a resource-based view of the firm, scholars discuss how various categories of firm’s market-facing resources/capabilities (Madhavaram and Hunt 2008; Srivastava, Fahey, and Christensen 2001) can constitute key value drivers for customers within business relationships (La, Patterson, and Styles 2008; Ulaga and Eggert 2006).

  3. Moderator analyses are conducted for the pooled model only for brevity and due to sample size limitations for conducting group analyses by country and relationship factor.

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Acknowledgments

For their insightful feedback on earleir drafts of this manuscript, the authors would like to thank the editor, four anonymous reviewers, as well as David Schumann, Mark Houston, Chris White, Wolfgang Ulaga, and Brian Fugate. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Demand and Supply Integration Forum in the College of Business at The University of Tennessee and Schneider National Corporation as well as the support of Tom Nightingale.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marketing, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, Waco, TX, 76798-8007, USA

    Christopher P. Blocker

  2. Department of Marketing and Logistics, College of Business Administration, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA

    Daniel J. Flint & Matthew B. Myers

  3. Department of Marketing, College of Business, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523, USA

    Stanley F. Slater

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  1. Christopher P. Blocker
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Correspondence to Christopher P. Blocker.

Appendix—Construct Measurement Items

Appendix—Construct Measurement Items

Respondents marked their agreement on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Except where noted, prompts included: “Compared to what we expect from our company’s best providers, this service provider ...”

Responsive Customer Orientation (newly developed measure), C.R. = .93, α = .95, AVE = .74, Loadings range = .80–.88

 Always responds effectively when we ask them to make changes.

 Takes immediate action when we tell them we’ve changed what we want from the relationship.

 Reacts quickly to our requests for changes.

 Is always flexible to adapt to changes we ask for.

 Never stops short of fully accommodating our requests for changes.

 Is always willing to accommodate our requests for changes.

Proactive Customer Orientation (newly developed measure), C.R. = .93, α = .94, AVE = .73, Loadings range = .83–.88

 Excels at anticipating changes in what we need from them before we even ask.

 Seems to spend time studying changes in our business environment so they can exercise better foresight about our future needs.

 Successfully anticipates changes in our needs.

 Presents new solutions to us that we actually need but did not think to ask about.

 Is always looking for clues that might reveal changes in what we value beyond what we currently ask of them.

 Presents new ideas to us that help us keep pace with our changing environment.

Offer Quality (Homburg et al. 2005; Ulaga and Eggert 2006), C.R. = .91, α = .91, AVE = .77, Loadings range = .87–.90

 Exceeds our standards for quality products and services.

 Consistently provides quality products and services to us over time.

 Provides us with excellent quality products and services.

Personal Interaction (Gremler and Gwinner 2000; Ulaga and Eggert 2006), C.R. = .90, α = .90, AVE = .76, Loadings range = .85–.89

 Maintains excellent personal interaction with our people.

 Has built a very good working relationship with us.

 Is very easy to work with.

Service Support (Ulaga and Eggert 2006), C.R. = .90, α = .90, AVE = .78, Loadings range = .84–.90

 Offers excellent support services to help us deal with day-to-day issues.

 Provides excellent support services.

 Offers superior support services that always provide the appropriate information right when we need it.

Customer Desired Value Change Intensity (Flint et al. 2002), C.R. = .93, α = .93, AVE = .74, Loadings range = .78–.90

 Our needs from this provider are constantly changing.

 What we want from this service provider changes very rapidly.

 Due to significant changes we are experiencing, we often ask this provider to do things drastically different from the way they have done them in the past.

 Changes in what we want from this provider reflect large shifts in our business needs for them.

 Due to the rapid changes we are experiencing, we want this provider to make a large number of modifications in their services.

Customer Value (Gao et al. 2005; Ulaga and Eggert 2006), C.R. = .92, α = .92, AVE = .73, Loadings range = .84–.89

 Creates superior value for us when comparing all the costs versus benefits in the relationship.

 Considering the costs of doing business with this service provider, we gain a lot in our overall relationship with them.

 The benefits we gain in our relationship with this provider far outweigh the costs.

 Our company gets significant customer value from this provider relationship.

Satisfaction (Lam et al. 2004), C.R. = .94, α = .94, AVE = .84, Loadings range = .88–.94

 In general, my company is very satisfied with the services offered by this provider.

 Overall, my company is very satisfied with its relationship with this provider.

 Overall, how satisfied is your company with this provider? (extremely dissatisfied—extremely satisfied)

Loyalty (Doney and Cannon 1997) (Extremely unlikely—Extremely likely), C.R. = .88, α = .89, AVE = .70, Loadings range = .82–.87

 Given that there is a need, we intend to continue doing business with this provider for the foreseeable future.

 Given that there is a need, how likely is it that your firm will continue doing business with this provider during the next year?

 Given that there is a need, how likely is it that your firm will continue doing business with this provider during the next 3 to 5 years?

Organizational Communication Effectiveness (Judge and Elenkov 2005), C.R. = .93, α = .93, AVE = .81, Loadings range = .89–.91

 The flow of communication in our company between top executives, managers, and staff is highly effective.

 In our company, communication always occurs in a very timely fashion.

 Communication flows effectively across our company’s organizational and functional units.

 Transnational Relationship Structure: This provider maintains in-country employees to service our company.

 Global Relationship Scope: This provider delivers services to our company in more than one country.

C.R. = Construct Reliability, α = Cronbach’s alpha, AVE = average variance extracted. Statistics for reliability and validity for each measure exceeded recommended thresholds in all 5 countries; statistics for each country are available from the authors upon request.

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Blocker, C.P., Flint, D.J., Myers, M.B. et al. Proactive customer orientation and its role for creating customer value in global markets. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 39, 216–233 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0202-9

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