Revisiting the Marketing Capabilities from an Adaptive Perspective: An Abstract

Abstract

Marketing capabilities are important to make contribution to the theory and practice of strategy and to get commercial success of the products and services marketed by the firm. More recent attention has focused on the adaptability for a different business functions such as management (Akgun et al. 2014; Baard et al. 2013; Shoss et al. 2012), supply chain (Fu and Fu 2015; Mei et al. 2015), and manufacturing (Jin et al. 2013; Liu et al. 2015) etc. However, few attempts have been made to examine adaptability in the context of marketing (Clark 2000; Day 2011; Lu et al. 2009; Oktemgil and Greenley 1997) and much of the research up to now has been theoretical, and they have not investigated and operationalized marketing capabilities from an adaptive perspective. Adaptive marketing capability (AMC) is a firm’s ability to identify and capitalize on emerging market opportunities, and the development of adaptive capability is often accompanied by the evolution of organizational forms (Wang and Ahmed 2007). AMC lets to organizations to reconfigure them quickly in changing environments rather than merely identify existing demands and then exploit the available resources (Staber and Sydow 2002). AMC is based on response to product-market opportunities, marketing activities for responding to these opportunities, and speed of response (Oktemgil and Greenley 1997). In this context, we attempt to operationalize these AMC constructs, which are adaptive brand management, social customer relationship management, adaptive pricing management, and multichannel management. This paper attempts to offer a contribution to the marketing strategy literature by presenting a model for researchers and managers to understand potential interrelationships among strategic orientations (market and innovation orientation), adaptive marketing capabilities (adaptive brand management, sCRM, adaptive price management, and multichannel management), speed-to-market, and innovativeness. This study has explored the importance of AMC for speed-to-market and innovativeness. Although marketing capabilities in organizations have been investigated for many years, a study from an adaptive perspective in the field of marketing strategy broadens our understanding of this subject. The findings of this study confirm our hypotheses drawn from this theoretical framework about conceptualization of AMC, except adaptive price management for innovativeness and speed-to-market, and sCRM for innovativeness. A possible explanation for these results may be the lack of adequate variable which mediates relation between sCRM and innovativeness. Because, raw data obtained from sCRM need to be interpreted and made functional to be used for innovation processes. Besides, the concept of adaptive price management might be reconsidered with mediator or moderator variables which is related to the use of technology and information technologies. © 2022 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.