ABSTRACT
The term ‘market orientation’ has existed in the business marketing literature for many years, but has only since around the beginning of the 1990’s been conceptualised in a way that has facilitated testing in a scientific manner (Harrison-Walker 2001), beginning with Narver and Slater (1990) and Kohli and Jaworski (1990). There has since, however, been much work dealing with various alternative conceptualisations of the constructs that make up a market orientation, varying from Deshpandé, Farley and Webster’s (1993) view that a market orientation should be considered as synonymous with a customer orientation, to Harrison-Walker’s (2001) behavioural/cultural conceptualisation, where Narver and Slater’s (1990) ‘Customer Orientation’ and ‘Competitor Orientation’ are matched with Kohli and Jaworski’s (1990) ‘Intelligence Generation,’ ‘Intelligence Dissemination,’ and ‘Responsiveness’ constructs, and expanded by the addition of a fourth behavioural construct, a ‘Shared Interpretation of Information,’ inspired by Daft and Weick (1984) and located between the dissemination and responsiveness to information.
