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Where is the opportunity without the customer? An integration of marketing activities, the entrepreneurship process, and institutional theory

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Abstract

Marketing and entrepreneurship have long been recognized as two key responsibilities of the firm. Despite their tight integration in practice, marketing and entrepreneurship as domains of scholarly inquiry have largely progressed within their respective disciplinary boundaries with minimal cross-disciplinary fertilization. Furthermore, although firms increasingly undertake their marketing and entrepreneurial activities across diverse settings, academe has provided little insight into how changes in the institutional environment may substantially alter the processes and outcomes of these undertakings. Herein, we integrate research on marketing activities, the entrepreneurship process, and institutional theory in an effort to address this gap. We first discuss market orientation as enhancing a firm’s opportunity recognition and innovation, whereas marketing mix decisions enhance opportunity exploitation. We then examine how entrepreneurship leads to innovation directed toward market orientation and marketing mix activities. Based on this foundation, we examine differences in marketing and entrepreneurship activities across institutional contexts.

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Notes

  1. More recently, a “creation” perspective has been advanced as complementary to the “discovery” perspective (Alvarez and Barney 2007). Nevertheless, even in this perspective, the opportunity is merely described as a market without any discussion of the prevalence or hierarchy of customer needs that define the “value” component of an opportunity and determine whether a viable market exists. As of yet, the activities of creation have not concerned how the entrepreneur interacts with and comes to understand customers to create an opportunity.

  2. Marketing scholars use the term “intelligence,” whereas entrepreneurship scholars use the term “knowledge.” We use the terms interchangeably.

  3. Narver and Slater (1990) discuss market orientation as also including three behavioral components: customer orientation, competitor orientation, and inter-functional coordination. Within their conceptualization, firms characterized by a market orientation (1) seek to understand customers’ current and future needs and how to satisfy these needs, (2) study current and potential competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in terms of how they serve customers’ needs, and (3) promote coordinated, firm-wide resource management to provide superior customer value. Considering Narver and Slater’s conceptualization alongside Kohli and Jaworski’s, significant overlap seems to exist with customer/competitor orientations and intelligence generation, and between inter-functional coordination and intelligence dissemination/organizational responsiveness (Cadogan and Diamantopoulos 1995; Lafferty and Hult 2001).

  4. Zhou et al. (2005) provide further support for these findings in terms of radical innovation, although they find that market orientation actually decreases disruptive innovations (i.e., products that create wholly new markets and supplant existing products). Together, these findings suggest that market orientation may support market-driven behaviors but undermine market-driving behaviors (Jaworski et al. 2000).

  5. To this point, we have presented market orientation as having an indirect effect on firm performance through its effects on the entrepreneurship process. While a significant amount of research has shown that innovativeness only partially mediates the relationship between market orientation and firm performance (Kirca et al. 2005), innovativeness (and the innovation that results from this emphasis) is only one aspect of the entrepreneurship process. The firm must also leverage this innovation to exploit the opportunity to realize performance outcomes. As Hult et al. (2005) illustrate, organizational responsiveness fully mediates the relationship between market orientation and performance. In accordance, we believe that the effect of market orientation on firm performance surfaces completely through its influence on the entrepreneurship process.

  6. We do not expect all firms to equally undertake learning activities in response to reduced performance. In a highly complementary stream of research, scholars have examined a firm’s learning orientation, or the firm’s orientation to support a commitment to learning, shared vision, and open-mindedness in questioning assumptions about the firm’s relationship with its environment (Baker and Sinkula 1999; Hurley and Hult 1998; Sinkula et al. 1997). While we strongly believe that a learning orientation shapes how and to what extent a firm learns, we do not explicitly address the role of a firm’s learning orientation here in order to maintain focus specifically on the integration of marketing and entrepreneurship.

  7. An additional reason that could be offered for why market-oriented firms can be ineffective in responding to changing customer needs is that competitors are just more effective in their response. Interestingly, counter to this logic, Slater and Narver (1994) provide evidence suggesting that market-oriented firms can sustain firm performance despite hostile and turbulent competitive environments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Entrepreneurship, Oklahoma State University, 104C Business Building, Stillwater, OK, 74078, USA

    Justin W. Webb

  2. Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843-4221, USA

    R. Duane Ireland, Michael A. Hitt & Laszlo Tihanyi

  3. Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, Fisher Hall, 2100 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH, 43210-1144, USA

    Geoffrey M. Kistruck

Authors
  1. Justin W. Webb
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  2. R. Duane Ireland
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  3. Michael A. Hitt
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  4. Geoffrey M. Kistruck
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  5. Laszlo Tihanyi
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Correspondence to Justin W. Webb.

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Webb, J.W., Ireland, R.D., Hitt, M.A. et al. Where is the opportunity without the customer? An integration of marketing activities, the entrepreneurship process, and institutional theory. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 39, 537–554 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0237-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0237-y

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