The Role Of Market Orientation On Business Performance: An Empirical Analysis Within Retail Sector in Turkey

: In today’s competitive environment, businesses constantly innovate and improve themselves in the face of necessity and they are in a new quest to survive. Therefore, only firms that adapt to the market conditions and changes in the business subsist. At this point firms need an understanding of marketing approach that rely on a broad base of consumer knowledge. Retail is one of the most important sectors, which gives direction to the economy. However, exchange rate fluctuations, tax rates and policies affect the sector in a negative way. Within this scope, market orientation practices gain importance for firms in the sector. Market orientation generates organizational culture, which monitors customers and competitors, targets customer satisfaction ensuring coordination among all departments. When firms accept market orientation, they work to guarantee consumer satisfaction and all their activities are expected to be compatible with the conception of modern marketing (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990). In the present study, main goal was to assess the relation between market orientation factors, namely, customer orientation, competitor orientation and inter-functional coordination (Narver and Slater, 1990) and business performance within top 100 retail sector service companies in Turkey listed in Perapost journal. With this aim, data was collected through a questionnaire from 510 participants that are middle and upper level managers of the strategic business units in the top 1oo retail service firms in Turkey. Financial indicators namely sales growth rate and market share were used in measuring business performance and Logistic Regression analyses were employed to identify factors that identify which aspects of market orientation are highly influential in generating market share and sales growth in service companies. Findings of the study demonstrate significant correlation with customer orientation and sales growth rate; however, competitor and inter-functional orientation show no relation with the performance measures indicating the value of customer relationships in services in creating financial outcomes. The study’s concentration on different service sectors further stren gthens the generalizability of the findings. In conclusion, this study aims to contribute relevant literature by presenting a comprehensive literature review and to provide a base for future works for various sectors in Turkish economy. Based on the research findings, it is recommended that market orientation centered around customers is a beneficial organizational culture for retail companies to adopt. Further this work remarks that there is a difference in business operations and social structure features of emerging markets and advanced markets. That’s why applicability of market orientation in the form of competitor and inter-functional orientation as a competitive advantage may be less in emerging markets. Finally, it can be highlighted that unfair competition, limited resources infrastructure and environmental uncertainty can be cited as major impediments to the development process of market orientation.