Based B2b Environment Corporate Marketing Strategy And Performance Study

Two of the major research streams developed in strategic marketing in the past ten years are relationship marketing and marketing orientation (Steinman et al.2000). This dissertation attempts to bridge research in these two areas by probing how marketing orientation is related to relationship building. The study examines the role of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, key constructs in relationship marketing, in the relationship between marketing orientation and performance. Furthermore, this research hypothesizes that the relationship between each of the three behavioral components (customer orientation, competitor orientation and inter-functional coordination) of marketing orientation (Narver and Slater 1990) and customer satisfaction need not be the same.This dissertation is one of the first studies to explore the marketing orientation-customer satisfaction link, the relationship between satisfaction and performance (Leuthesser and Kohli 1995), and the loyalty-performance chain (Morris and Holman 1988) in a business-to-business (B2B) environment especially in the background of China. The results showed that the positive relationship between marketing orientation and customer satisfaction, the major thesis of this inquiry, was strongly supported. According to the result of the analysis, the relationship was moderated by uncertainty of the industry, a contingency variable. While customer orientation and competitor orientation were both positively related to customer satisfaction and performance, inter-functional coordination was not related to customer satisfaction but related to performance. However, inter-functional coordination had a moderating effect on the customer orientation-performance chain and competitor orientation-performance linkage. Customer satisfaction was related to performance while loyalty got the opposite result. Managerial implications and future research opportunity were also discussed.