A survey of market orientation research (1995–2008)

Since 1990, market orientation (MO) has received considerable attention in the marketing literature. Little research so far provides preliminary and useful information to facilitate good understanding of MO. This study presents a comprehensive survey of extant marketing literature using keyword classification from 1995 to 2008. It serves as a tutorial and aims to help the beginner researcher or practitioner to have access to MO, including its definitions, applications and problem domains. Based on the scope of 514 MO articles, we find that the number of publications on MO has significantly increased since 2001 with steady growth in recent years. In addition, these selected articles are scattered across 153 journals and mostly published in 10 academic journals. The contribution of our paper is to provide a means (i.e., keyword index) to conceptualize and operationalize the coverage of MO. It provides a conceptual framework to organize this vast body of research. This study ends with some discussions and conclusions.

Research Highlights
► Market orientation research has increased significantly since 2001.
► The top ten Journals for MO research account for 46.6% of the total number of articles.
► European journals lead American journals in MO research by a 55%–45% margin.
► MO is related to improvement on a broad array of outcomes in a broad array of settings.
► MO is now so widely and well accepted, and it has become a cost of doing business in many industries.