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Paper info: Market Orientation: Identifying Gaps between Theory and Practice

Title


Market Orientation: Identifying Gaps between Theory and Practice

Authors


Amalia Pandelica, Ionut Pandelica and Olimpia Oancea

Place of Publication


The paper was published at the 27th IMP-conference in Glasgow, Scotland in 2011.

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Abstract


ABSTRACT
The purpose of the study is to determine the extent to which market orientation literature during the last 20 years, offers practitioners the tools and knowledge needed to manage the organizational change process in order to increase the degree of market orientation or to implement this philosophy within the organization. From this perspective, in the first stage of the study there were conducted over 30 in-depth interviews with marketing managers and top managers from companies operating in various industries. Based on these interviews was generated a set of questions, which reflects the views of practitioners about the tools and knowledge needed to develop market orientation within their own organizations. In the second stage of the study, using the classification and the hermeneutic spiral, we conducted an extensive analysis of the literature in the field about market orientation in the last 20 years, in order to see to what extent it provides solid answers to the questions of practitioners about the implementation of market orientation. The results of the study reveal that although market orientation was one of the most attractive research fields in the last 20 years at the international level, the implementation of market orientation issue has been insufficiently explored. Also, although many previous researches include a large number of answers to practitioners’ questions, these responses vary greatly from one author to another, so we can conclude that market orientation literature is fragmented. Based on these findings, we proposed a number of perspectives from which researchers should develop a new integrative model for the implementation of market orientation, to assist the managers in the organizational change process. The limit of the study derives from the fact that, maybe relevant researches regarding various aspects of market orientation concept were not identified and included in our analysis, so our conclusions relying on the previous researches identified.
Key words: market orientation, implementation process, practicioners needs, gap