eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Objective

Adopting a customer oriented strategy has been a strong trend among companies. Several studies show the positive effect of it, but evidence is also presented that it is not suitable in all businesses. There is a great amount of literature about the implementation of market orientation, presenting it more as a demanding process of organizational change rather than just a decision. The key characteristics of market orientation are the customer oriented segmentation of the market and utilization of the market intelligence and customer needs to guide organizational decision making and activities. However, surprisingly little attention is put into the question, whether market orientation could and should be applied only partially when the nature of the market does not allow the implementation of the market oriented strategy and way of working in its pure form. This study analyzes a selected market of a case company in order to assess the suitability of market oriented strategy in that market.

Methods

This paper presents a twofold research. First, a market analysis is executed as an assigned project for Vaisala Oyj. Objective of the empirical research was to form an overview of humidity measurement device market in food industry processes. Second, the findings of the original study are used to assess the aspects of market oriented strategy that could be used in the studied market. In order to create an image of the lessons of previous studies, literature in the relevant fields is studied. Those fields include strategy orientations and especially market orientation, organizational change following a strategy change as well as practical aspects of market orientation such as segmentation and market intelligence. Trends, market size and potential, customer needs as well as competitors and industry structure is discovered using interviews, market reports and Internet searches to collect the material. Information is processed using PESTEL and McKinsey frameworks. Finally, the results are compared with the lessons of previous literature.

Findings

This study gives both an overall picture of the studied market and recommendations based on market orientation literature. Those include new insights for customer prioritization, re-segmentation and communication. I also suggest that based on my study, the future discussion about market orientation should take into account the finding that in some markets, market orientation is challenging to apply and solution can be to apply it only partially.