engleski

Level of Marketing Orientation Among Croatian Beverage Producers and Distributors

Market orientation has been a topic of an academic research interest for many years. It has been broadly acknowledged that market orientation is strongly associated with business performance. However, past studies often found that majority of the companies did not apply marketing concept to the full extent. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a level of market orientation of companies that produce and distribute beverage products on the Croatian market. Starting from the assumption that marketing conception and marketing orientation of a company represents a fundamental concept for making „better“ products and delivering a superior value offering aimed at needs of the target segments and thus is a critical part of competitive capabilities and a generator of advantage on market, in a hypothesis made for the purpose of empirical research authors tried to specifically find out the degree in which market orientation contributes toward competitive performance in the sector and following that to find out which is the dominant generic competitive strategy and which are the most effective components of marketing strategies employed in the sector. Research has been conducted on the sample of managers working in marketing & sales or as CEOs in companies that produce and distribute beverage products. Research resulted with a wealth of data describing selected elements and degree of market orientation as well as most frequent elements of dominant marketing strategies employed throughout the sector. The results of research are even more interesting as the beverage producing and distributing sector is at present time under strong competitive pressure as a result of several major market trends: (1) consumer segments becoming more heterogeneous, (2) growth of retail market concentration and thus rise of power of leading retail chains in the channels of distribution which resulted with the shift of control over marketing mix, and (3) more intensive value offering as a result of growing marketing capabilities of domestic producers and further market penetration of world’s most famous beverage brands. Therefore, this paper represents valuable scientific addition to the marketing knowledge and could prove to be useful in further analysis and development of competitive capabilities based on efficient marketing strategies.

marketing orientation; beverage industry; Croatia; marketing strategy

Special Issue: 7th International CIRCLE Conference 2010, Davies, B.J. & Vignali. C. (Eds.) // Rad je kao predavanje prezentiran na skupu The 7th International CIRCLE Conference for Consumer Behavior and Retailing Research, održanom od 07.-09.04.2010., Estoril, Portugal.