Market orientation and performance: the moderating effects of product and customer differentiation

Poses the question is the influence of market orientation stronger in specialty markets with high levels of differences in product features and customer needs/applications, compared to commodity markets? Reports that regression results indicate that the only significant interaction is between customer differentiation and market orientation as an influence on new product success, relative product quality and customer retention. However, examination of partial correlations in the quadrants formed by customer and product differentiation indicates that market orientation seems to be a more important determinant of all aspects of performance in markets characterized by low levels of customer differentiation but high levels of product differentiation. Examination of these quadrants suggests that market orientation may be a more important determinant of performance in the high product differentiation/low customer differentiation quadrant, because of high levels of change in technology and customer needs. States that, in addition in this quadrant, there is an indication that since large firms have the advantage in R&D emphasis, small firms need more market orientation to compete. Although market orientation had no influence on performance in the commodity segment, there is an indication that smaller firms may need a higher level of market orientation to compete with large firms emphasizing low‐cost advantages.