Customers, Strategy and Performance

A true marketing orientation is associated with superior performance in the UK retail financial services industry. This finding runs counter to some recent criticism of marketing influence on the banking sector. Empirical research in the UK retail financial service industry found that successful companies appear to balance a profit orientation with an orientation towards the most difficult market to satisfy, the wealthy. Successful companies focused on a distinct group of customers, and did not rely on traditional methods such as existing family links to attract business. They also maintained tighter control over profitability and costs. Utilizes expert assessment as the basis of performance measurement, and compares this technique with an alternative, peer assessment. Uses the Delphi technique to develop a performance measure, and both performance ratings and findings suggest that the performance of expert assessment and peer assessment as performance measurement methods is similar.