Benefits Of Market Orientation

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Cultivating Market Orientation Listening to Customers and Employees The key aspect of a market orientation is listening to customers by including their desires and concerns into the company’s decisions. While businesses have varying degrees of interaction with their customers, all create a product or service to market to a customer. Consequentially, this business orientation can lead to multiple benefits for an organization to include “increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, higher finical performance, and improved new product creativity” (Reed, Goolsby, & Johnston, 2016b, p. 3591). Ultimately, the goal of a market orientation is to gain a competitive advantage over competitors, A market orientation has been proven to lead to a higher …show more content…

However, Lings and Greenley suggest utilizing an internal market orientation to strengthen the organization’s overall market orientation (2010). An internal market orientation is “a philosophy of valuing and treating employees as an intermediate set of customers inside the firm and enhancing the value provided to employees with the aim of encouraging them to enact the organizations’ marketing objectives” (Lings & Greenley, 2010, p. 323). Thus, valuing employees and inculcating them with a customer orientation attitude improves the firm’s market orientation and overall competitive advantage. While current research linking internal marketing to a market orientation is limited, the general benefits of valuing and listening to customers can be directly attributed to a successful market orientation …show more content…

The span of control in an organization concerns the levels of management within an organization (Robbins& Judge, 2009). Therefore, an organization with a wide span of control means there are fewer higher level managers; instead, the organization has more employees and lower level management. This structure provides employees with more autonomy leading to more flexibility and empowerment of the employees. Additionally, a wide span of control places the organization closer to the customer, which allows the employees to gain greater insights into the customers’ concerns and desires. Since an internal market orientation places great emphasis on the employees’ and values their opinions, a large amount of trust is implied between the employer and the employee (Larson & Sasser, 2000). Due to the high level of trust, an organization trusts its employees to handle greater levels of responsibility that are required with a wide span of control. A wider span of control is congruent with an internally focused orientation because it demonstrates trust and provides employees with meaningful

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