A Study On Antecedents And Performance Consequence Of Export Market Orientation

The concept of market orientation is regarded as the foundation stone of strategic marketing and strategy management as well as prerequisite to achieve competitive advantage and provide unique customer value. Due to the importance of this construct, lots of relevant researches have focused on defining it and exploring its application and implimentation in business activities. In the context of increasingly fierce global market competition, export adventure plays a critical role. In additin, export markets are more distant politically, cuturally and geographically than domestic markets and are charaterized by diversification. For these reasons, export enterprizes should be more market oriented so as to enhance their competitive capabilities. Nevertheless, despite the fact that some scholars are appealing to special researches into market oriented export activities, most of current studies, especially empirical studies on market orientation, are based on data of domestic firms sample. Those researches into the relationships among export marekt orientation, its antecedents and export performance consequences are fragmentary and far from systemtic. This paper aims at examining those relationships and, in doing so, trying to provide some useful insights and policy recommendations concerning how to exploit international market successfully.First of all, the paper introduces the background and reasons for the topic selection, briefly reviews the findings and actuality of market orientation research literature in the last decade from the perspective of definition issues, measurement issues, model issues and implementation issues, and then, explains the research objectives, concrete research scope, research methodology, research technical route, innovative and new ideas, structure organization and main contents of the paper.We define market orientation as follows. Market orientation consists of three behavioral components (generation of market intelligence, dessemination of market intelligence and responsiveness to market intelligence) and an integral dimension (inter-functional coordination mechanism). To be more specific, behavioral componets include all kinds of behaviors associated with marekt intelligence generation, dessimination and responsiveness that are oriented to market consumers, competitors and other extraneous marekt condition, and the integral dimension refers to coordinated efforts with the aim at creating unique value and organizational wide commitment to market oriented behavior, and it can guarantee effective and efficient implementation of market orientation. This definition combines two most dominant conceptualizations in the present marketing literature and provides foundation for both empirical and theoretical research of the paper.This study develops a multiple-item measurement scale (EMO scale) of Chinese firms on the basis of a brief literature review of the conceptualization and measurement of market orientation and the findings of qualitative interviews, and the reliability and validity of the scale are assessed. In addition, the paper selects export enterprises of Hubei province as samples and then examines the relationships among export market orientation, its antecedents, its performance consequences and moderating variables. The main empirical findings are: (1) export experience and degree of formality are not significantly related to export market orientation; (2) degree of centralization has significant negative relationship with export market orientation; (3) inter-functional connectedness, degree of leaders' emphasis, reward system and traing system have significant positive relationship with export marekt orientation; (4) degree of export market orientation is positively related to export performance; (5) the positive relationship between export market orientation and export performance is stronger in case of high market turbulence; (6) competitive intensity and technological turbulence have no significant moderating effects upon the relationship between export market orien...