Customer Orientation:

Research on customer orientation has been conducted at two levels of analysis— the individual level (e.g., Brown et al., 1993, Hoffman and Ingram, 1991) and the organizational level (e.g., Homburg and Pflesser, 2000, Kennedy et al., 2003, Kohli and Jaworski, 1990, Rindfleisch and Moorman, 2003). Research at the individual level relates to the interpersonal contact between employees and customers. A key aspect of customer orientation at the individual level relates to the “ability of the sales people to help their customers and the quality of the customer–salesperson relationship” (Saxe & Weitz, 1982, p.343). In contrast, research at the organizational level has focussed on the concept of “customer orientation” which is also contrasted with market orientation, and the market-driven company (Day, 1994, Felton, 1959, Hunt and Morgan, 1996, Kotler, 1977, McKitterick, 1957, Webster, 1992), that fundamentally establishes the tenets of organizational behaviour with respect to a firm's customers and competitors. There are numerous definitions of customer orientation (see Table 1). Irrespective of the variations in the definitions they all revolve around the customer. The underlying assumption of the definitions in Table 1 (with the exception of Deshpande et al., 1993, Narver and Slater, 1990) is that an organization has multiple departments, information gathering is formally organized, and information is disseminated across the departments; they are embedded in the information system approach. The definitions by Narver and Slater (1990) and Deshpande et al. (1993) are embedded in the cultural perspective and describe customer orientation as a belief. Deshpande et al. (1993) go further to include all the stakeholders, keeping in mind the long term profit of the enterprise.

The cultural perspective would appear to be more relevant to SMEs, which have a variety of ownership forms ranging over proprietorship, partnership, and the private limited form; they vary in terms of owner/manager involvement as well. Though not all SMEs have well established formal systems to gather and disseminate data, they are usually closer to their customers because of their spatial proximity and are able to fulfil the requirements of their customers quickly and more flexibly, transfer customer intelligence quickly and with less deterioration, and they can implement marketing plans speedily since they have fewer organizational and bureaucratic layers and are less formal in nature (Keskin, 2006). Therefore, in this study, the conceptualization of Customer Orientation embedded in the culture perspective was adapted from Deshpande et al. (1993).

Performance measurement has been defined as “the process of quantifying action, where measurement is the process of quantification and action leads to performance” (Neely, Gregory, & Platts, 1995). From the perspective of marketing, organizations achieve their goals, i.e. they perform, by satisfying their customers with greater efficiency and effectiveness than their competitors (Kotler, 1984). In the discipline of marketing, performance has been commonly explained by two dimensions (Ruekert, Walker & Roering, 1985), namely efficiency and effectiveness. These dimensions indicate that there can be internal and external reasons for pursuing specific courses of action (Neely et al., 1995). The internal reason could be linked to achieving efficiency, and the external with effectiveness. Here, effectiveness refers to the extent to which customer requirements are met, while efficiency is a measure of how economically the firm's resources are utilized when providing a given level of customer satisfaction. Effectiveness refers to market performance (MP). Efficiency is the outcome of a business's programme in relation to the resources employed in their implementation. Efficiency considers the relationship between organizational outputs and the inputs required to reach the organizational outputs (Walker & Ruekert, 1987). Efficiency refers to the financial performance (FP) of the organization; here it has been defined in terms of profitability and operationalized as return on sales (ROS). In the subsequent sections performance is expressed along two dimensions i.e. market performance and financial performance.

I need a research proposal for marketing advanced research about customer orientation and SME performance , not from internet

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I need a research proposal for marketing advanced research about customer orientation and SME performance ,

not from internet