Market Orientation

Market orientation was first defined within marketing literature in the early 1990s as an organization-level culture comprising values and beliefs about putting the customer first in business planning. Market orientation is rooted in the marketing concept, which was developed in the 1950s and 1960s by academics such as Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt. Essentially, market orientation is a firm-level measurement of the behaviors and activities that reflect the marketing concept, and as such it is a cornerstone of the marketing management and marketing strategy paradigms.

The emergence of market orientation construct in the early 1990s was a part of a larger movement [Page 324]within the marketing discipline which, since the beginning of the 1980s, had experienced increasing interest in interactions between buyers and sellers and the ...