Market-oriented, Marketing Innovation And Organizational Performance: Market-driven Or Drive The Market

The market-oriented theory is an important foundation for marketing research, making marketing concepts operational, and the research results can have a great impact on business activities of enterprises. However, numerous studies show that there are no consistent conclusions on how the market-oriented behaviors influence product innovation and organizational performance. Academics are puzzled, and similarly, puzzled with whether to take the initiative to guide the market or to follow in the practice. These doubts led to re-examine of the market-oriented concept itself, in consideration of the intermediary roles of all environmental variables and introduction of intermediary variables of marketing innovation, thus, further explore the role of market-oriented from different perspectives. Chinese enterprises are now facing rapidly changing market environments, in which the government is taking less control and market orientation is increasing gradually. It should become a serious issue how enterprises focus on the existing customer needs from the market-oriented perspective, concern about future changes, and take full account of the role of marketing innovation in the pursuit of corporate performance.Therefore, based on an in-depth study of the existing theory, we constructed a new theoretical model, attempting to explain the two types of market-oriented behavior. The basic meaning and logic of the new model is: Marketing innovation has a vital impact on organizational performance, while market-driven orientation and driving-market orientation, as two strategic thoughts of the marketing innovation and organizational performance, will also be a direct role, but that role will be influenced by the degree of sector coordination and external environmental characteristics. On this basis, we conducted a questionnaire survey, whose validity had been assured by reliability and validity analysis. The empirical results show that: 1,Marketing Innovation (including product innovation and marketing solutions innovation) is important, and beneficial for a sustainable competitive advantage and long-term performance;2,Market-driven orientation is not conducive to the enterprises in improving their product innovation ability, and also, do no good to enterprises access to long-time performances, contrary to many academics;3,Driving-market orientation has a direct impact on product innovation ability, but no significant direct impact on the long-term performance. This is not to say that driving-market orientation is not working on the organizational performance. On the contrary, it illustrates that driving-market orientation impacts the organizational performance through marketing innovation. Or we can say that, the product innovation is an effective intermediate variable between driving-market orientation and organizational performance.4,The role of sector coordination is complicated, and will not always realize managers' goals as is expected. Technology and market fluctuations, two environmental characteristics, have a more remarkable impact on marketing innovation or organizational performance.Theoretically, we adopted empirical method in this article, for the first time, to test the relationship between two strategies, market-driven orientation and driving-market orientation, and organizational performance. Plus, we introduced marketing innovation into marketing solutions, and answered some major issues in theory, like what are the differences between enterprises using these two concepts? Driving- market enterprises have any competitive advantages? What is the significance of market-driven strategy for Chinese enterprises? Besides, the introduction of environmental variables and sector coordination variables provides a useful reference in this study area as well.From the view of practice, this article provides a theoretical basis for the government, authorities and enterprises to strengthen marketing innovation. When creating, managers should not only focus on product innovation, but also should pay more attention to the innovation of marketing solutions. At this stage in China's economic development, the need for driving-market orientation has become increasingly urgent, thus, only when enterprises care more about the future and basic needs of customers, and focus on the innovation of technology, products, marketing, rather than blindly tracking, or copying competitors, can they effectively improve organizational performance.