THEORIES OF MARKETING
SUMMARY
ARTICLES
Theories of Marketing
MSc Business Administration
University of Amsterdam
2019/2020
TABLE OF CONTENTS
WEEK 1 PAGE 3
1. Narver & Slater (1990). The effect of a market orientation on business profitability.
2. Slater & Narver (1998). Customer-led and market-oriented, lets not confuse the two.
3. Collis & Rukstad (2008). Can you say what your strategy is?
4. Achrol & Kotler (2012), Frontiers of the marketing paradigm in the third millennium.
5. Homburg, Jozi & Kuehnl (2017), Customer experience management: toward implementing
an evolving marketing concept.
6. Lemon, Rust & Zeithaml (2001). What drives customer equity?
WEEK 2 PAGE 11
1. Laughlin, P. (2014). Holistic customer insight as an engine of growth.
2. Van den Driest, F., Sthanunathan, S., & Weed, K. (2016). Building an insights engine.
3. Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are
predictable from digital records of human behavior.
4. Pai, P., & Arnott D.C. (2013). User adoption of social networking sites: Eliciting uses and
gratifications through a means–end approach.
5. Reynolds, T. J., & Gutman, J. (1984). Advertising Is Image Management.
6. Magids, S., Zorfas, A., & Leemon, D. (2015). The new science of customer emotions.
WEEK 3 PAGE 16
1. Robert J. Dolan (2014). Marketing Reading: Framework for Marketing Strategy
Formation.
2. Almquist, Senior and Bloch (2016). The Elements of Value Measuring—and delivering—
what consumers really want.
3. Day (2011), Closing the Marketing Capabilities Gap, Journal of Marketing
4. Edelman & Singer (2015). Competing on customer journeys.
5. Kim & Mauborgne (2005), Blue Ocean Strategy: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE.
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WEEK 4 PAGE 21
1. Wells, V.K. (2014). Behavioural psychology, marketing and consumer behaviour: a
literature review and future research agenda.
2. Gelbrich, K., Gäthke, J., & Hübner A. (2017). Rewarding customers who keep a product:
How reinforcement affects customers' product return decision in online retailing.
3. Pauwels, K. (2015). Truly accountable marketing: the right metrics for the right results.
GfK Marketing Intelligence Review.
4. John, L. K., Mochon, D., Emrich, O., & Schwartz, J. (2017). What’s the Value of a Like.
Harvard Business Review.
5. Mecredy, P., Wright, M. J., & Feetham, P. (2018). Are promoters valuable customers? An
application of the net promoter scale to predict future customer spend. Australasian
Marketing Journal
WEEK 5 PAGE 27
1. Keller, K. L. (2016). Reflections on customer-based brand equity: perspectives, progress,
and priorities.
2. Keller, K. L., Sternthal, B., & Tybout, A. (2002). Three questions you need to ask about
your brand.
3. Schultz, D.E. (2016). Rethinking Brand Development in an Interactive Marketplace.
4. Horst, P., & Duboff, R. (2015), Don't Let Big Data Bury Your Brand: What Capital One
learned about over relying on analytics.
5. Holt, D. (2016). Branding in the age of social media.
WEEK 6 PAGE 33
6. Fischer, Volkner & Sattler (2010). How important are brands? A cross-category, cross
country study.
7. Dwivedi, Merrilees & Sweeney (2010). Brand extension feedback effects: a holistic
framework.
8. Hsu, L., Fournier, S., & Srinivasan, S. (2016). Brand architecture strategy and firm value:
how leveraging, separating, and distancing the corporate brand affects risk and returns.
9. Watson, Beck, Henderson & Palmatier (2015). Building, measuring, and profiting from
customer loyalty Building.
10. Hsieh, Chiu & Chiang (2005). Maintaining a committed online customer: A study across
search-experience-credence products.
11. Silveira, C., Oliveira, M. and Luce, F. (2017). Comparing alternative approaches to
estimate customer equity.
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Week 1 Course introduction & Development in marketing thinking
1 Market orientation
Narver & Slater (1990). The effect of a market orientation on business profitability.
Business performance is affected by market orientation, an effect that has been observed for decades but
proved by valid measures by the authors of this article. Market orientation has for both commodity and
non-commodity product businesses a positive effect on business profitability.
- develop valid measure for market orientation and analyze effect on business profitability
Sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) = sustainable superior value for its customers. Buyer value =
difference between what the buyer perceives as its expected total acquisition and its use costs. Market
orientation = the organization culture that most effectively and efficiently creates the necessary behaviors
for the creation of superior value for buyers and continuous superior performance for the business.
Customer/competitor orientation = all activities involved in acquiring information about the buyers/
competitors in the target market and disseminating it throughout the business.
Three behavioral components:
- 1. Customer orientation: sufficient understanding of target buyers to create value:
- increasing benefits in relation to costs
- understand economic and political constraints at all levels in the channel
- 2. Competitor orientation: understanding short-term strength and weaknesses + long-term capabilities
and strategies of key current/potential competitors
- 1. Inter functional coordination: the coordinated utilization of company resources in creating superior
value for target customers
Two decision criteria: (1) long-term focus, (2) profit objective (main goal is profitability).
Expectation: finding a general positive relationship Business-Specific Factors Business Performance
- relative costs
between market orientation and business - relative size
profitability within all three types of businesses in
the sample (commodity, distribution and speciality). Market-Level Factors:
Previous literature pointed out eight situational - growth
- concentration
variables that may affect a business its profitability, - entry barriers Market Orientation
this study controls for those variables (Figure 1). - buyer power - customer orientation
- seller power - competitor orientantion
- technological change - inter-functional coordination
Findings:
- Among both commodity and non-commodity Figure 1. The independent effects model of relationships
businesses, market orientation is strongly related between market orientation, business-specific factors,
market-level factors and performance.
to profitability.
- non-commodity: positive relationship appears to
be monotomic
- commodity: positive relationship is found only in businesses that are above the median in market
orientation
- For both: relative costs are also an important determinant of profitability. Market growth in certain
situations too.
- Commodity businesses with the greatest market orientation have substantial control over their markets.
General implication - that goes for non commodity businesses as well - businesses with the highest
degree of market orientation successfully pursue both differentiation and low cost strategies.
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, THEORIES OF MARKETING
To increase confidence in the power of the outcomes however, the study has to be replicated in diverse
environments and over time, to make the findings also clear for managers/businesses.
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2 Market orientation revisited
Slater & Narver (1998). Customer-led and market-oriented, lets not confuse the two.
Developing a customer orientation appears not to be wise during a period of industry incontinuity, as was
stated by Christensen and Bower (1996). But, other research shows how ‘customer orientation’ consists of
two forms:
- customer-led philosophy
- market-oriented philosophy
According to this article, the advise is to become market-oriented, since this works best regardless of
market conditions.
The marketing concept says that ‘an organization’s purpose is to discover needs and wants in its target
markets and to satisfy those needs more effectively than competitors’. This is supported by Kohli and
Jaworski (1900), who concluded that a market orientation is essential to success.
Let’s check the differences between the two forms:
Problem with customer-led business: it’s reactive, short time in focus and leads to adaptive rather than
generative learning. Troublesome aspects:
- ‘tyranny of the served market’: see the world only through current customers’ eyes
- constrains a firm’s ability to
innovate, ‘customers are notoriously
Customer-led Market-oriented
lacking in foresight’
- the value of traditional market research Strategic orientation Expressed wants Latent needs
tools is limited (with developing Adjustment style Responsive Proactive
innovative products/services) Temporal focus Short-term Long-term
Objective Customer satisfaction Customer value
Problems with pursuing increased
customer satisfaction: Learning type Customer surveys Customer
observation
- the development of a valid measure of
Learning processes - Key account - Lead-user
custumer satisfaction relationship relationship
- management is likely to focus on short - Focus groups - Contiuous
- Concept testing experimentation
term, leading only to incremental - Selective
improvements partnering
How market orientation creates a superior value:
- sharing knowledge broadly throughout the organization
- acting in a coordinated and focused way
Lead users to a market oriented business are (potential) customers who have needs that are advanced
compared to other market members and who expect to benefit significantly from a solution to those needs.
This type of exploration leads to discovery of solutions to unexpressed needs. Market orientation includes
the search for unserved markets, and is not a ‘marketing’ orientation. Necessary for innovation.
Probe and learn process: the initial products is seen as prototype that becomes the foundation for
subsequent, more-refined generations that follow.
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