Market orientation and customer satisfaction: An empirical investigation

Two of the major research streams developed in strategic marketing in the past ten years are relationship marketing and market orientation (Steinman et al. 2000). This dissertation attempts to bridge research in these two areas by probing how market orientation is related to relationship building. The study examines the role of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, key constructs in relationship marketing, in mediating the relationship between market orientation and performance. Furthermore, this research hypothesizes that the relationship between each of the three behavioral components (customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination) of market orientation (Narver and Slater 1990) and customer satisfaction need not be the same.; This dissertation is one of the first studies to explore the market 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 environment. The results showed that the positive relationship between market orientation and customer satisfaction, the major thesis of this inquiry, was strongly supported. This relationship was so robust that it was not moderated by competitive intensity, a contingency variable. While customer orientation and competitor orientation were both positively related to customer satisfaction and performance, interfunctional coordination was not related to either customer satisfaction or performance. However, interfunctional coordination had a moderating effect on the customer orientation-performance chain and the competitor orientation-performance linkage. Neither customer satisfaction nor loyalty was related to performance. Managerial implications and future research opportunity were also discussed.