Market-Driven Hotel Brands: Linking Market Orientation, Innovation, and Performance

"Market orientation" is a term popularized by marketing practitioners to indicate the extent to which a firm is market driven. This presumed linkage between market orientation and profitability has caught the attention of scholars, but, surprisingly, only two prior studies have reported a positive association between the two. Given the special relevance to the hotel industry of being market driven, we believe this industry provides the ideal setting for demonstrating the link between market orientation and performance. This research examines this linkage in the hotel industry. The results of our study suggest that market orientation is positively and significantly related to innovation, subjective performance, and objective performance. This result yields a number of useful ideas about how to harness the power of the marketing concept.