The Effects Of Marketing Capabilities On Firm’S Performance

This paper aims to develop a conceptual model used in the empiric testing of a firm’s marketing capabilities and describe the effects of these capabilities over organizational performance. Previous research explains performance differences between firms through the resource-based view and the structure-conduct-performance paradigm. Criticism towards these two perspectives, emerging from absence of a low competitive level market, lack of an explanation towards the manner in which resources are developed and how these need to be exploited to generate a competitive advantage and the shortage of solutions in dynamic environments has determined the development of the marketing capabilities perspective. Because of these limits, many of the studies in the area of strategic marketing reported a misperception of managers towards marketing and thus the focus of managers only on the operational dimension of marketing. A firm’s marketing capabilities represent a multidimensional construct, a combination of human assets, market and organizational assets. The present research uses results collected through the processing of 121 questionnaires completed by large Romanian companies, and tests the existence of marketing capabilities and their effects on organizational performance in these firms through simple linear regression. The constructs’ measurement scales are determined to be reliable because the Alpha Cronbach value exceeds 0.6. Validity of the constructs was proven through the use of factor analysis. Thus, the paper confirms the existence of marketing capabilities on a firm’s level and its positive effect on performance. One major contribution of the present study is that it offers an addendum to empirical data on the effects of marketing capabilities over organizational performance available in literature.