The Effect of a Market Orientation on Business Profitability

1990/10/01 by John C. Narver, Stanley F. Slater · 7,947 citations
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · #Business #Commodity #Computer science #Finance #Firm Innovation and Growth #Industrial organization #Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting #Market orientation #Marketing #Mathematics #Measure (data warehouse) #Orientation (vector space) #Profitability index #Sample (material)

paper · doi:10.1177/002224299005400403

published in Journal of Marketing 54(4), 20-35 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 1990/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

Marketing academicians and practitioners have been observing for more than three decades that business performance is affected by market orientation, yet to date there has been no valid measure of a market orientation and hence no systematic analysis of its effect on a business's performance. The authors report the development of a valid measure of market orientation and analyze its effect on a business's profitability. Using a sample of 140 business units consisting of commodity products businesses and noncommodity businesses, they find a substantial positive effect of a market orientation on the profitability of both types of businesses.

Citations

• Managing Assets and Skills: The Key to a Sustainable Competitive Advantage
• Consumer Perceptions of Price, Quality, and Value: A Means-End Model and Synthesis of Evidence
• Market Orientation: The Construct, Research Propositions, and Managerial Implications
• A Paradigm for Developing Better Measures of Marketing Constructs

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