Market orientation and profitability

A vast body of literature attends to the market orientation of businesses, and much of that literature appears to show that market orientation and profitability are linked. Unfortunately, the nature of the linkage is not easy to specify, since the literature pool presents many different competing findings. This essay presents a much-condensed summary of the literature base, and in so doing, highlights how, despite the confusion within the literature, for many firms, being more market-oriented than the competition is probably a good thing. However, there is sufficient evidence in the literature to indicate that for some companies, high levels of market orientation may not be ideal. The essay investigates how marketing strategists can go about identifying the extent to which their firm should adopt market orientation.