Essays on supplier responsiveness and buyer firm value - Nyenrode ...

customer, can only be developed over time and as a part of a general learning curve. This lack of
esoteric customer knowledge is because the firm may not know that such knowledge exists, and what
overall benefit it would be to the firm culture. ii) Is a cultural market orientation a resource? The
learning upon which a customer’s understanding is based is not always something that the firm can
intentionally develop. Hence, it qualifies on one of the important tests of a resource, namely that it is
inimitable (Srivastava, Shervani, & Fahey, 1998). iii) Taking this argument a step further, then the
latent needs identification, which is an outcome of the cultural process of market orientation, cannot
always be purposefully developed, since the required insights may be just a function of pure
coincidence. iv) Market orientation is viewed as a continuous process or a culture of innovation (Kohli
& Jaworski, 1990; Langerak et al., 2004a; Langerak et al., 2004b). Firms and managers want to avoid
sunk costs or the cannibalization of existing product markets. Therefore, in our opinion, a culture must
exist within the firm to allow a focus on innovations and that fosters a managerial set of measurement
tools that will allow them to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Overall, although the
evidence on the cultural perspective of market orientation varies, there is some support for the notion
that it does have a link to firm performance.
2.2.6 The Process-Based View of Market Orientation
The process-based view of marketing orientation considers it to be the implementation of the
marketing concept (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990). As mentioned earlier, there are three components
of market orientation. Each component of market orientation sequentially paves the way for the
next step in the process of marketing orientation. Hence, intelligence is generated, disseminated,
and, finally, a response is created. But managers discriminate between trustworthy and
untrustworthy sources of intelligence before issuing a response that is based on the intelligence
(Kohli & Jaworski, 1990). Therefore, all intelligence available will never be paid attention to and
only trustworthy sources of intelligence will generate a response. In order to be continuously
trusted, the responsibility lies with the intelligence provider to be accurate because faulty
intelligence could erode the trust that the intelligence provider enjoys. In a strategic supplier-andbuyer
relationship, a customer’s trust in the supplier relationship is important because it has
positive consequences, such as customer committment (Siguaw et al., 1998).
Besides intelligence sharing, there are other ways of building customer goodwill, such as
through innovations. Being market-oriented, by default, leads to innovations; according to Kohli
and Jaworski (1990), “a market orientation involves something new or different in response to
market conditions, it can be viewed as a form of innovative behavior” (p. 11). The process-based
view holds that market orientation corresponds with the process of innovating (Kohli &
Jaworski, 1990). Therefore, market orientation involves trying new or innovative solutions on
target markets, and such is an inherently risky endeavor. Hence, according to the process-based
view of market orientation, managers must be tolerant of risk taking if they are to be market
oriented (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990).
Is there really a difference between the process-based versus cultural-based view of
market orientation? Although Kohli and Jaworski (1990) do recognize that market orientation
can be a plan or philosophy, they do not explicitly recognize market orientation as a part of an
organizational culture. The authors eventually recognized that both the cultural perspective and
process-based perspective are of significance. Likewise, the cultural perspective of Slater and
Narver (1990) operationalizes the culture as specific behaviors or a series of activities.
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