Strategic Customer Response Capability and Marketing Performance: An Empirical Investigation of Cosmetics Businesses in Thailand

Abstract

Marketing is the set of activities for creating and offering values to that customer through market orientation that can create in to two ways: market-driven orientation and market-driving orientation. This research emphasis on market-driven orientation starts from understanding the customer’s needs and reacts to those needs. Nevertheless, there still has been less empirical research of market-driven orientation to fulfill this research gap, the main purpose of this research is to investigate the relationships among dimensions of strategic customer response capability (SCRC), its antecedents, consequences and the moderating effects of competitive oriented. The SCRC is proposed based on four dimensions including organizational expertise orientation, operational speed focus, customer oriented product development and customer value awareness. The dynamic capability and contingency theory are applied to describe the relationship among these variables. The population is the cosmetic businesses in Thailand, and the sample size totals 162 firms. The data were collected by a mail survey questionnaire, and sent directly to the marketing directors or marketing managers of each firm. Hypotheses were tested by regression analysis.

The findings indicate that organizational expertise orientation, operational speed focus, customer oriented product and customer value awareness has a positive influence on customer commitment and customer loyalty.

For the antecedents, the result indicate that survival vision has a positive influence on organizational expertise orientation and customer orientation product development. customer oriented culture has a positive influence with organizational expertise orientation, operational speed focus and customer value awareness. Moreover, customer diversity has a positive influence with customer value awareness. In addition, competitive oriented is positively moderate the influences of the relationships between survival vision and customer value awareness. competitive oriented does not play a significant moderate the relationship between customer oriented culture, customer diversity and all dimension of strategic customer response capability (organizational expertise orientation, operational speed focus, customer oriented product development and customer value awareness).

In conclusion, strategic customer response capability plays a significant role in creating customer commitment, customer loyalty and marketing performance. This finding provides a unique theoretical contribution in expanding the previous knowledge and literature review of strategic customer response capability. Moreover, this finding indicates the importance of strategic customer response capability for increasing the firms’ competitive advantage and receiving superior performance. Furthermore, researchers should consider reinvestigating other industries to compare the findings and gains for greater generalizability in the future.

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