Market orientation and marketing strategy creativity: assessment of their antecedents

Abstract

Creativity of marketing strategies is very vital for companies, who want to broaden their markets toward foreign markets to increase sales and profit. Due to rise of globalization, competition among companies became fierce and multinational companies began to threaten domestic companies in all around the world with their ability to innovatively provide what customer exactly needs. The threat of competition in domestic markets led domestic companies internationalize their businesses and expand their markets to foreign markets to enjoy opportunities in there. The literature articulates that creative marketing strategies play significant role in success of companies in foreign markets. Creativity of marketing strategy has two major components, which are meaningfulness and novelty of marketing strategy. This study proposes a model that is explaining how Turkish companies can have a creative (meaningful and novel) international marketing strategy to be successful in foreign markets. The study suggests that while market orientation approach of a company provides meaningfulness to marketing strategy, organizational creativity provides novelty to marketing strategy of the company. However, in the model there are also organizational antecedents of both market orientation and organizational creativity. These antecedents effect existence of market orientation and organizational creativity in the companies. An interview was conducted with marketing executives of 5 companies, one is a multinational company and 4 are international Turkish companies, to get their ideas about the model, and a survey was done with 119 employees of international Turkish companies in certain sectors to test the model of this study. To make statistical analyses, descriptive, frequency, Pearson correlation, t-test, one-way ANOVA and multiple regression analyses were employed. The result of the study indicates that Turkish companies' international marketing strategies are quite creative and they perform quite well in foreign markets. However, there are some problems in organizational creativity and novelty of marketing strategies ofTurkish companies. In line offmdings ofthe study, some suggestions were proposed to Turkish companies and their managers to progress creativity of international marketing strategies that increase performance of companies in foreign markets.