Multiple Stakeholder Market Orientation: A Conceptualization and Application in the Field of Destination Marketing

The market orientation (MO) paradigm suggests that generating and reacting to information from the product market facilitates the development of sustainable competitive advantage and enhanced organizational performance. However, the proliferation of MO as the dominant empirical approach for the investigation of the marketing concept has not gone unchallenged. Recently, proponents of “the stakeholder marketing movement” have suggested that the customer- and competitor-centric approaches characteristic of the currently accepted MO paradigm marginalize the increasingly important role of salient external stakeholders in the process of value creation. In the spirit of the stakeholder marketing perspective, the present research proposes a more broadly defined conceptualization of MO that acknowledges the role of salient external stakeholders in value creation, a phenomenon referred to herein as multiple stakeholder market orientation (MSMO).

From the theoretical perspective of both stakeholder theory and the resource-based view of the firm, MSMO is positioned as a more appropriate conceptualization of the MO paradigm in terms of Kotler’s (1972a) generic concept of marketing as well as Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) service-dominant logic of marketing. Using these frameworks, a conceptual framework is derived in which MSMO is hypothesized to affect the development of relationally-based marketing assets. In turn, the competitive advantages attributable to these assets are proposed to positively affect organizational performance.

This framework is developed and empirically tested within the context of the destination marketing industry. Because destination marketing organizations (DMOs) have a broad set of market and non-market stakeholders, this industry is an ideal context for the operationalization of MSMO as conceptualized above. In order to test the proposed framework, Churchill’s (1979) construct development process was used to develop measurements of the multidimensional MSMO, three stakeholder-specific asset categories (customer-based assets, industry-based assets, and politically-based assets), and organizational performance. Upon establishing operational definitions for these constructs, a measurement instrument was developed and disseminated to a sample of 600 destination marketing executives in the U.S. Using structural equation modeling, responses to the survey were used to (1) verify the proposed dimensional structure of MSMO and (2) test the relationships among MSMO and the asset- and performance-based constructs proposed within its nomology.