Conventional marketing wisdom holds that a customer orientation provides a firm ... orientation exhibits a negative association with subscriber ticket sales, total ...
Glenn B. Voss & Zannie Giraud Voss
Strategic Orientation and Firm Performance in an Artistic Environment Conventional marketing wisdom holds that a customer orientation provides a firm with a better understanding of its customers, which subsequently leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and firm performance. However, there are cautions that being too customer focused can lead to inertia, and anecdotal evidence suggests that it may be better to "ignore your customer" when developing new products. Building on the market orientation research stream, the authors examine the impact of three alternative strategic orientations—customer orientation, competitor orientation, and product orientation—on a variety of subjective and objective measures of performance in the nonprofit professional theater industry, which is marked by high rates of artistic innovation and largely unpredictable customer preferences. The results indicate that the association between strategic orientation and performance varies depending on the type of performance measure used. However, the most unambiguous result is that a customer orientation exhibits a negative association with subscriber ticket sales, total income, and net surplus/deficit.
There is no question that if a novel is amusing, it wins the approval of a public... I believe, however, that to say, "Ifa novel gives the reader what he was expecting, it becomes popular," is different from saying, "Ifa novel is popular, this is because it gives the reader what he was expecting of it." The second statement is not always true —Umberto Eco 1994, p. 527
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ne of marketing's most revered axioms is that to be successful a product must satisfy some need or desire in the marketplace. As a corollary to this axiom, marketers generally propose that the marketing concept and customer-orientated behaviors should guide marketing mix decisions. At the same time, some researchers caution that being too customer focused can lead to inertia (see Christensen and Bower 1996; Hamel and Prahalad 1991; Leonard-Barton 1992), and anecdotal evidence suggests that it may be better to "ignore your customer" in the new product research and development process (Martin 1995; Moore 1995). This line of reasoning maintains that customers are often resistant to the idea of change, limited in their ability to provide creative input into the new product development process, and even unreliable in predicting which new product ideas ultimately will be embraced (e.g., Veryzer 1998). Consider, for example, that in artistic endeavors a customer orientation may result in boilerplate action films, romance novels, and landscape paintings. Although demand for such derivative new products clearly exists, there also
Glenn B. Voss is an assistant professor. Department of Business Management, North Carolina State University. Zannie Giraud Voss is Assistant Professor of the Practice and Managing Director, Program in Drama, Duke University. The authors thank Theatre Communications Group for supporting this research and Ellen Garbarino, Mark Johnson, Mitzi MontoyaWeiss, Beverly Tyler, Rajan Varadarajan, and three anonymous JM reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.
Journal of Marketing Vol. 64 (January 2000), 67-83
exists a latent marketplace for completely fresh ideas. The idea that the product development and marketing process for artistic innovations may be different from that of other contexts has been recognized by a variety of researchers (see Kotler and Scheff 1997). In a thought-provoking discussion, Hirschman (1983, p. 53) maintains that "the marketing concept, as a nonnative framework, is not applicable to ... artists." She further notes that [A]esthetic ... products are among the most important and useful classes of phenomena for marketers to investigate.... Their producer-centered, subjective, abstract, holistic and unique nature makes them incrementally valuable as objects for research because of the difficulties involved. To deal adequately with such products we must grapple with the central premise of both our theories and our measures. (Hirschman 1983, p. 53) In this study, we use an artistic context, namely, the nonprofit professional theater industry, to explore boundary conditions for one of marketing's most fundamental premises: that a customer orientation provides a finn with a better understanding of its customers, which then leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and firm performance. We explore this relation within a multidimensional conceptualization of strategic orientation that we adapted from Gatignon and Xuereb (1997) and that includes three distinct orientations: (1) customer orientation, an organization's commitment to integrate customer preferences into the product development and marketing process; (2) competitor orientation, an organization's commitment to integrate competitor intelligence into the product development and marketing process; and (3) product orientation, an organization's commitment to integrate innovation into the product development and marketing process. The multidimensional strategic orientation construct examined in this study extends market orientation research and responds to recent calls to test market orientation against other orientations (Grover 1996) and explicitly incorporate Strategic Orientation / 67
product innovation into models of market orientation and performatice (Hurley and Hult 1998; see also Jawiarski and Kohli 1996; Narver, Slater, and Tietje 1998). Our choice of industry follows Kohli, Jaworski, and Kumar's (1993, p. 475) suggestion that "in the interest of pursuing the limits of the [market orientation] concept, the most exciting measurement extensioti may lie in non-profit organizations, non-traditional organizational forms, or non-standard marketing applications." It also provides an opportunity to examine empirically a position forwarded by Holbrook and Zirlin (1985), which maintains that though nonprofit arts organizations tend to adopt a product orientation that targets a high-culture audience, some customer-oriented activity may be necessary to maintain fiscal viability. This position implicitly assumes that nonprofit arts organizations can improve firm performance by being more customer oriented (see also Andreasen 1982). Our study enables us to test this assumption by examining the relative impact that customer, product, and competitor orientations have on firm performance in a nonprofit, artistic context. The remainder of this article is organized as follows: In the next section, we present a multidimensional conceptualization of strategic orientation that builds on market orientation research; review several studies that have explored the link between firm perfonnance and market orietitation or strategic orientation; and offer hypotheses for the relationships among firm performance and strategic orientation, firm resources, product quality, and interfunctional coordination. We then describe our methodology and study sample and conclude with a discussion of the results and implications.
Reviewing l\/lodeis of Performance and Market or Strategic Orientation Extant literature contains several different definitions and operationalizations of market orientation. Narver and Slater's (1990) conceptualization of market orientation includes three components: customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination. Kohli, Jaworski, and Kumar (1993) maintain that market orientation includes customer, competitor, and technology information generation; dissemination; and response implementation. On the basis of a prospectively designed meta-analysis of three market orientation scales, Deshpande and Farley (1996) propose a reduced market orientation scale that focuses solely on customer-related activities. Deshpande and Farley maintain that, though the reduced scale fails to capture some of the richness of detail present in the three original scales, it captures the essence of the market orientation concept and eliminates confusion about definition and measurement. Rather than adopt the more narrow conceptualization proposed by Deshpande and Farley (1996), Gatignon and Xuereb (1997) propose a multidimensional conceptualization that captures the richness of detail and nuance initially included in the conceptualizations of market orientation developed by Narver and Slater (1990) and Kohli, Jaworski, and Kumar (1993). Gatignon and Xuereb use the term
68 / Journal of Marketing, January 2000
"strategic orientation" to refer to three distinct orientations: customer, competitor, and technology (or product). In this study, we adapt Gatignon and Xuereb's (1997) conceptualization and define strategic orientation as a multidimensional construct that captures an organization's relative emphasis in understanding and managing the environmental forces acting on it. These forces include (1) upstream suppliers of product inputs, including intellectual capital and innovations; (2) downstream customers; and (3) current and potential competitors. This multidimensional, strategic orientation construct accommodates the finn's orientatioti toward the variety of extemal forces that likely affect its perfonnance (e.g., Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Porter 1991; Slater and Narver 1995) and the tension between supplyside and demand-side marketing that exists in dynamic, complex, or high-tech markets (e.g., Moore 1995; Shanklin and Ryans 1984). Consistent with Day and Nedungadi (1994), we expect that managers and firms tend to place greater emphasis on certain elements of the environment to the exclusion of others. Thus, though the external orientations—product, customer, and competitor—examined in this study are components of a firm's strategic orientation, they are also distinct behavioral dimensions that likely exert independent effects on firm performance. In the following sections, we develop a conceptual framework that integrates empirical research that has examined the link between firm perfonnance and market or strategic orientation (see Figure 1). This framework identifies four categories of variables that have been proposed by various researchers to have direct or moderating effects on firm performance, in conjunction with market or strategic orientation: (1) industry characteristics, including supply, demand, and competitive characteristics; (2) the strategic position that describes a finn's relative position within its industry; (3) product characteristics that describe a product's features relative to competitor products or, in the case of a new product, relative to the firm's current products; and (4) organizational characteristics that describe how a firm manages its interfunctional activities. Following a brief review of market or strategic orientation-performance findings, we discuss each of these categories in greater detail. The Link Between Performance and Market or Strategic Orientation Previous research typically has predicted a positive relationship between market orientation and perfonnance on the assumption that a market orientation provides a firm with a better understanding of its environment and customers, which ultimately leads to enhanced customer satisfaction. Empirical studies offer results that suggest a positive relation between market orientation and managers' perceptions of overall firm perfonnance (Jaworski and Kohli 1993), managers' perceptions of financial performance (Pelham and Wilson 1996; Slater and Narver 1994), managers' perceptions of sales growth (Slater and Narver 1994), and managers' perceptions of new product performance (Atuahene-Gima 1995, 1996; Pelham and Wilson 1996; Slater and Narver 1994). At the same time, several analyses do not support a direct, positive relationship between performance and market
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Strategic Orientation / 75
tive and objective perfonnance measures, we describe the results separately. For consistency and parsimony, discussion of direct effects refers to results reported in Model 2, discussion of moderator results refers to Model 3, and three significance levels are recognized for all analyses: p < .10, p< .05, and/7< .01. Results Using Objective Performance Peasures The results using objective performance measures suggest the following (see Table 1): First, product orientation exerts a marginally significant, positive effect (/> < .10) on subscriber attendance but no effect on any of the other objective performance measures. Competitor orientation exerts a positive effect on subscriber attendance {p < .01) and singleticket attendance (p < .01), no significant effect on total income, and a negative effect on net surplus/deficit (p < .05). Customer orientation has no effect on single-ticket attendance and a negative effect (p < .05) on subscriber attendance, total income, and net surplus/deficit. Thus, Hi^ receives negligible support, Hn, receives mixed support, and Hjc receives no support from the analyses using objective performance measures. Second, seating capacity is related positively to subscriber attendance (p < .01), single-ticket attendance (p < .01), total income (p < .01), and net surplus/deficit (p < .05). Quality is related positively to net surplus/deficit (p < .10) but not to any of the other objective performance measures. Thus, the analyses using objective performance measures offer solid support for H2 but negligible support for H3. Third, interfunctional coordination exerts direct, positive effects on subscriber attendance (p < .05), single-ticket attendance (p < .05), total income (p < .05), and net surplus/deficit (p < .01). The results support moderator effects only with net surplus/deficit as the dependent variable (p < .01). Thus, H4;, is supported by all the analyses using objective performance measures, and H4b receives support in one of the four analyses. Results Using Subjective Performance Measures The results using subjective performance measures suggest the following (see Table 2): First, product orientation exerts a positive effect (p < AO) on perceived subscriber performance but no effect on the other two subjective performance measures. Competitor orientation has no effect on any of the subjective perfonnance measures. Customer orientation exerts a negative effect on perceived subscriber performance (/? < .10) and perceived financial perfonnance (p < .05) but no effect on perceived single-ticket perfonnance. Thus, Hia receives weak support and H|b and Hi^ receive no support from the analyses using subjective perfonnance measures. Second, seating capacity is not related to any of the subjective performance measures, thus providing no support for H2. Quality is related positively to perceived subscriber performance (/7 < .05), perceived single-ticket performance (p < .01), and perceived financial performance (p< .01), providing strong support for H3. Third, interfunctional coordination exerts no direct effect on any of the subjective performance measures. There are marginally significant (p < . 10) moderator effects for in76 / Journal of Marketing, January 2000
terfunctional coordination with perceived subscriber performance as the dependent variable. Thus, H^^ is not supported by any of the analyses using subjective perfonnance measures, and H4|j receives weak support in one of the three analyses.
Discussion The use of multiple, subjective, and objective measures of firm performance in this study revealed some consistent and some inconsistent patterns of results. In the following sections, we attempt to identify these patterns and offer summary inferences. Strategic Orientation and Performance Overall, our results offer little support for Hi^, which predicted a positive association between product orientation and firm performance, but the results reported in Tables 1 and 2 suggest that a product orientation might be associated with a stronger subscriber base. Although this association is weak, it is consistent with Hirschman's (1983) position that the artistic integrity and expression that infuse the artistic mission require a self-centered product orientation, as well as with other empirical findings that indicate that subscribers embrace and share the organizational values and artistic mission embodied by an arts organization to a greater extent than single-ticket buyers do (see Bhattacharya, Rao, and Glynn 1995; Voss and Voss 1997). As opposed to single-ticket buyers who attend productions on the basis of positive reviews and word of mouth, theater subscribers share the risk that not every play will be popular with the general public. The results offer equivocal support for Hu,, which predicted a positive association between competitor orientation and performance. Table 1 indicates that, after controlling for product quality and seating capacity, a competitor orientation leads to larger audiences. This result suggests that competitor-oriented theaters can successfully implement audience development tactics that proved effective at other theaters. It should be noted that the operationalization of the competitor orientation construct focused on competitors' audience development and fundraising tactics and failed to capture whether theaters monitor a wider range of competitor actions, including which new plays were produced and which playwrights, directors, and actors were used. We may have obtained stronger (or weaker) results if competitor orientation had been operationalized to include a wider range of competitor actions. Perhaps the most unambiguous pattern of results reported in Tables 1 and 2 is the finding that customer orientation has a negative association with subjective and objective measures of subscriber performance. This finding seemingly contradicts the relationship marketing literature, which generally would recommend using a customer orientation to develop and maintain strong customer relationships. However, it is again worth noting several distinguishing features of the nonprofit theater industry and its repeat customers. First, the theater industry relies on the creation of completely new products to maintain and drive demand, especially for repeat purchases. Second, theater subscribers are the
most frequent buyers who, more than the occasional buyer, demand creative new products that are thought-provoking and provide experimentation, enrichment, and escapism (Kotler and Scheff 1997). These frequent theatergoers represent the innovators, early adopters, and opinion leaders who pride themselves on being aware of the newest plays and rely on the product expertise of their nonprofit professional theater to keep them current. The collective results suggest that these frequent theatergoers respond more favorably to a strategy that aims to lead and educate customers than to one that is customer led (Hamel and Prahalad 1991). Single-ticket buyers, in contrast, might be characterized as what Hirschman (1983) refers to as the "public at large" or the "mass market." Our results suggest that a customer orientation has neither a positive nor an adverse effect on this broader marketplace. These single-ticket buyers, who are interested primarily in entertainment, relaxation, and laughter (Kotler and Scheff 1997), apparently respond favorably or at least adequately to less innovative and more "commercialized" creativity. It should be noted, however, that Tables 1 and 2 indicate that a customer orientation is associated negatively with a theater's financial perfonnance in both total income and net surplus/deficit. Collectively, these results imply that efforts to produce shows in response to customers' requests are not rewarded in this industry in the form of increased attendance, increased revenues, or improved bottom lines. We must emphasize, however, that our definition and operationalization of customer orientation focuses on the organization's commitment to integrate customer preferences into the product development and marketing process. Theaters' perfonnance likely benefits from being responsive to customer preferences with respect to ancillary services, for example, box office service and concessions. Thus, though marketing's role in new product development in professional theaters may be limited because of the inability to predict what customers will want or like, marketing likely plays a major role in pushing the product out into the marketplace (e.g.. Piper and Naghshpour 1996; Souder 1989; Workman 1993, 1998) and ensuring that customer-oriented salespeople are in the box office (cf Siguaw, Brown, and Widing 1994). Independent Effects of Seating Capacity and Product Quality The level of support for H2 and H3 is largely dependent on whether subjective or objective measures of performance are used; seating capacity had no significant association with any of the subjective measures of performance but was related positively to all objective measures of performance, and quality was related positively to the three subjective measures of performance but to only one of the objective measures of performance. One plausible explanation for the inconsistency of results for seating capacity across subjective and objective perfonnance measures involves the wording of the subjective measures, which asked managers to compare their theater's performance with peer organizations. If managers define peer organizations as those that have similar resources, such as seating capacity, a nonsignificant coefficient for seating capacity for the models using subjective performance measures would be expected.
The positive association between quality and the subjective measures of perfonnance may be attributable to common method variance; perceived quality and perceived performance both were measured on the same seven-point scale. If the association is spurious, though, why is quality not related to objective perfonnance? In responding to this question, it is worth noting that a nonsignificant association between quality and performance has been reported in prior market orientation-performance studies (e.g., Pelham and Wilson 1996), including one analysis that used an objective measure of performance (Jaworski and Kohli 1993). This observation suggests that either managers' perceptions of quality are not accurate measures of actual or consumer-perceived quality or that actual quality is not related to performance. Although the former explanation has merit (see Parasuraman, ZeithamI, and Berry 1985), we limit further discussion to reasons quality might not be related to performance in this industry. One plausible explanation for a nonsignificant association between current quality and current subscriber attendance and revenues involves the timing of the subscription purchase, which typically occurs prior to the season. As a result, subscription sales and attendance may depend more on prior quality and reputation than they do on current quality. In a study of the customers of a nonprofit professional theater, Garbarino and Johnson (1999) report that subscribers' purchase intentions depend primarily on their trust in and commitment to the organization. In addition, many theatergoers (subscribers and single-ticket buyers) decide to attend the theater for social reasons that are completely unrelated to the quality of the perfonnance, including a "desire to attend [the theater] with friends" and "just to have a night out" (Voss and Voss 1997, p. 285). These findings suggest that, for nonprofit professional theaters, current perfonnance quality may have relatively little association with current marketing and financial perfonnance. The Role of Interfunctional Coordination The results reported in Tables 1 and 2 indicate that interfunctional coordination (1) has a direct, positive effect on all objective performance measures and (2) moderates the relationship between strategic orientation and net surplus/ deficit. It is not clear why interfunctional coordination is related to objective perfonnance measures but not to subjective performance measures. Nor is it entirely clear why interfunctional coordination moderates only the relationship between strategic orientation and net surplus/deficit, though there are a couple of plausible explanations. First, the relatively small sample size may not have been sufficiently large to detect all significant moderator effects (see Arnold 1982). Second, net surplus/deficit represents a more complex measure of performance that incorporates both expenses and revenues. The net surplus/deficit results may reflect the impact of interfunctional coordination on the expense side of implementing a strategic orientation rather than, or in addition to, its impact on revenue generation. For the analysis that uses net surplus/deficit as the dependent variable, the product orientation and product orientation X interfunctional coordination terms are both nonsignificant. The competitor orientation and competitor Strategic Orientation / 77
orientation x interfunctional coordination terms and the customer orientation and customer orientation x interfunctional coordination terms are all significantly negative. These negative signs suggest that both a competitor and a customer orientation have a negative impact on a theater's bottom line and that smooth interfunctional coordination serves to amplify or exacerbate this negative effect. The customer orientation result is consistent with results that suggest a negative relationship between customer orientation and a variety of perfonnance measures. The competitor orientation result is seemingly inconsistent with results that indicate that competitor orientation has a positive impact on attendance and, to a lesser extent, total income. One speculative interpretation of this result is that fully embracing a well-coordinated competitor orientation may lead to increased expenses associated with implementing the activities that produce improved sales and marketing results. This unexpected result is consistent with prior research that suggests that being too competitor oriented can have a deleterious effect on the bottom line (Griffith and Rust 1997).
Conclusion Conceptual and empirical research generally supports a positive link between a customer orientation and firm performance, but a critical step in fully understanding a phenomenon is to establish its boundary conditions and recognize when alternative hypotheses become viable. Our findings contribute to the understanding of alternative strategic orientations by identifying one set of industry conditions in which a customer orientation may not be desirable, that is, nonprofit goals, high rates of intangible and artistic innovation, customers who may not be able to articulate their preferences, and lead customers who rely on the product expertise of the artist to inform and challenge them. Although our focus on a single artistic industry limits the generalizability of the findings, it should be noted that single-industry studies are warranted—even preferred— when the internal validity of the study is more important than the generalizability of the results (McKee, Varadarajan, and Pride 1989). Because one of our primary objectives was to explore possible boundary conditions for a fundamental marketing premise, we wanted to minimize systematic and random noise attributable to industry differences. As a result, we are confident in our finding that, in this industry, a customer orientation is associated negatively with firm performance. Moreover, as Drucker (1988, p. 45) predicts, "the typical large business 20 years hence is far more likely to resemble organizations that neither the practicing manager nor the management scholar pays much attention to today: the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra." Implicit in this prediction is the notion that mainstream managers and researchers may be informed by strategies or boundary conditions that first emerge in nontraditional sectors. Directions for Further Research Our findings add to the existing conceptual and empirical evidence that product or technological turbulence, unpredictable customer preferences, and competitive intensity may moderate the customer orientation-performance rela-
78 / Journal of Marketing, January 2000
tion. Additional studies that examine the role of these moderators in a variety of contexts are warranted. We suspect that the customer orientation-performance relation is likely nonpositive in contexts that are marked by artistic or aesthetic innovation, largely credence or experience goods, and unpredictable customer preferences. At the minimum, creative endeavors in the performing and fine arts, design and fashion industries, and academic research seem to fit these parameters. At the maximum, these results may apply to any context that involves discontinuous innovation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between strategic orientation and performance in either an artistic or nonprofit context; therefore, additional studies that explore this relation in other artistic and/or nonprofit settings are necessary to verify the results. It would be especially interesting to determine if similar results would be found for ideological products such as religion, politics, or even academic research. Although Hirschman (1983; see also Hirschman and Wallendorf 1982) maintains that the marketing concept does not apply to these ideological endeavors, casual observation suggests that at least some ideologists (e.g., politicians) practice a customer orientation. Does this practice improve "performance"? The results from our study are consistent with criticisms sometimes leveled against customer-oriented behavior by political leaders. In pandering to the masses, a politician may be viewed as a sellout by his or her most dedicated followers and ultimately lose disaffected party loyalists. For theaters, this apparently translates into fewer subscribers. It seems plausible that relational behavior may be a significant factor driving the negative customer orientationperformance findings in this study. It would be informative to examine whether these findings would hold in a commercial context in which relational behavior is largely absent. For example, the film industry faces many of the same product market characteristics faced by the theater industry, such as artistic innovation, largely credence or experience goods, and unpredictable customer preferences. However, unlike theaters that rely on ongoing relationships with season subscribers and repeat single-ticket buyers, the film industry releases its products through intermediaries in a distribution channel that ultimately cultivates little relational behavior by consumers. Casual observation suggests that this industry is split between major Hollywood studios that attempt to crank out large-budget, crowd-pleasing blockbusters and smaller, independent studios that produce art films. The major studios produce the biggest commercial successes and failures while the independent studios garner critical acclaim. Is customer orientation related to performance in this industry, and if so, is that relation positive or negative? One of the more intriguing results from our study is the finding that interfunctional coordination moderates the strategic orientation-performance relation only when net surplus/deficit is the dependent variable. We speculate that these results might reflect the complexity of the net surplus/deficit measure, which incorporates both expenses and revenues. Alternatively, these results may hold only in a nonprofit context, somehow capturing the satisficing (as opposed to maximizing) nature of the bottom line in a nonprofit organization. Additional research conducted in both
for-profit and nonprofit contexts could address these alternative hypotheses. Another subject for further research is the possibility that the choice of the key informant may bias results. Most previous research examining the market or strategic orientation-performance link has used a marketing manager as the key informant. A resource-based view of the firm would suggest that marketing managers might hold an exaggerated view of marketing's role and importance. In this study, we used managing directors, who are ultimately responsible for all of the theater's operations but not the creative decisions, as our key informants. Kohli, Jaworski and Kumar's (1993) study suggests that our results might have been different if we had used marketing or artistic directors as our key informants. Despite the difficulties involved, additional research should attempt to use multiple informants from different functional areas and examine the level of convergence in results across respondents. Finally, the results indicating a consistently positive association between managers' assessments of product quality and their assessments of performance and a largely nonsignificant association between managers' assessments of product quality and objective performance measures are troubling to researchers and managers alike. For researchers, these results underscore the potential problems associated with collecting subjective measures from the same source for both dependent and independent variables; specifically, common method variance may inflate an expected positive association or attenuate an expected negative association between variables. For managers, these results indicate that their assessments of quality have little or no association with objective performance, which suggests that either quality is not related to performance or managers' assessments of quality are not related to performance. Additional research should examine the validity of using managers' assessments as proxies for measures of phenomena that may be more appropriately measured objectively or from the customer's perspective. Managerial Implications Although the current findings are subject to verification and refinement, they offer several insights for managers of arts organizations. Specifically, our results suggest that arts managers should exercise caution in applying the marketing concept in general and a customer orientation in particular. As Hirschman (1983, p. 49) observes, artists often "challenge consumers in ways they may not want to be challenged." In so doing, the artist provides a valuable, and apparently valued, social function by stimulating intellectual diversity. Thus, arts managers should be cautioned that giving customers what they ask for might not be the only, or even the best, approach to developing season programming. In artistic endeavors, what customers really want may be inscrutable from the standard customer orientation perspective. Marketing's role in this context may focus primarily on promotion, pricing, packaging, and customer service, with an emphasis placed on developing strong social relationships with loyal customers (Bhattacharya, Rao, and Glynn 1995; Voss and Voss 1997). Instead of a customer orientation, arts leaders might do better to adopt a competitor orientation, looking to other or-
ganizations' audience development tactics rather than speculating about customer preferences. This observation is consistent with Scheff and Kotler's (1996) recommendation that arts organizations should seek strategic collaborations with other arts organizations to improve quality, build audiences, and cut costs. However, our results suggest that though a competitor orientation leads to improved attendance and revenues, it also seems to lead to higher costs and lower net surplus/deficit. These results may point to direct costs associated with implementing competitor activities or additional coordination costs associated with collaboration; An arts organization that chooses to adopt a customer orientation may want to consider alternative programming and packaging decisions. Our results suggest that arts programming based on customer input does not satisfy the most frequent theatergoers. Therefore, in implementing a customer orientation, an arts manager may want to present a variety of programming, with different productions targeting different customer segments and relatively little overlap of customers across productions. A managing director at a theater in a major metropolitan area with a diverse population described this as the "flavor-of-the-month" strategy. To encourage some repeat purchase, two- and three-play packages should be offered instead of, or in addition to, full-season subscriptions. Finally, the positive coefficients for interfunctional coordination in all of the analyses that use objective performance measures underscore the importance of encouraging cross-functional teamwork in a creative context. As Nonaka (1994) notes, creative activity produces chaos, and to be successful it must be balanced by a stable, hierarchical organization responsible for day-to-day implementation and orchestration. This simultaneous presence of creative chaos on the one hand and organizational stability on the other can lead to breakdowns in coordination efforts and a certain level of tension created by conflicting goals. Nevertheless, our results indicate that smooth interfunctional coordination across creative, production, and marketing activities enhances performance even in artistic environments. Considering the uncertain climate surrounding public funding for the arts, arts managers must become increasingly savvy about the impact of their organization's strategic orientation on firm performance and the relative effectiveness of different marketing strategies. It is incumbent on marketing educators to offer current and future arts managers a balanced perspective of the role of marketing in arts organizations. Our results suggest that a blanket extension of marketing wisdom drawn from mainstream applications may not be appropriate.
Appendix Measurement, Reliability, and Validity To develop measures for interfunctional coordination and the three strategic orientations, we adapted items found in the relevant literature (e.g., Gatignon and Xuereb 1997; Holbrook and Zirlin 1985; Kohli, Jaworski, and Kumar 1993; Narver and Slater 1990; Slater and Narver 1994) to capture theater activities more closely. We then refined these
Strategic Orientation / 79
measures on the basis of a pretest of 51 small, nonprofit, professional theaters with annual budgets less than $500,000. In the main study, the interfunctional coordination and strategic orientation items appeared randomly in a section titled "Some General Background Questions." Responses were captured on a seven-point scale anchored by "strongly disagree" (1) and "strongly agree" (7). To assess the reliability and validity of these scales, we first conducted exploratory factor analysis, which indicated that four factors had eigen values greater than 1; however, one of the items designed to measure competitor orientation ("We closely monitor which plays are successful at other theaters") loaded on customer orientation, which probably reflects an interest in producing plays that customers (albeit at other theaters) wanted to see. Therefore, we deleted this item and subjected the remaining items to another factor analysis, which produced four factors that had eigen values greater than I and collectively explained 72% of the vari-
ance in the scale items. In Table Al, we report the results of the factor analysis with orthogonal rotation, along with coefficient alphas for each scale. We then explored the nomological validity of the strategic orientation and interfunctional coordination scales by observing correlations between these constructs and other observable and latent constructs. The pattern of results presented in Table A2 supports the nomological validity of each of the four scales. Specifically, a product orientation is associated positively with the number of plays produced at the theater in fiscal year 1996 that were obtained directly from playwrights (i.e., new-to-the-world plays that had not been picked up by publishers); a customer orientation is associated positively with the number of plays that the theater obtained from publishers (which generally purchase the rights to plays that have demonstrated audience appeal); a competitor orientation is associated positively with the number of times the theater shared mailing lists with other arts or-
TABLE A1 Four-Factor Solution with Orthogonal Rotation
Product orientation in the theater industry We are always looking for good new plays and playwrights. We actively solicit and develop new plays. A key component of our artistic mission is to develop innovative new works.
F1
F2
F3
F4
.93 .86 .82
-.09 .05
.01 .13
.12 .15
-.26
-.11
.07
Customer orientation in the theater industry Our play selection is driven more by artistic considerations than by audience preferences. Audience preferences are a key factor in our play selection. We survey audiences to find out the plays they would like to see in the future.
-.17
.86
-.12
-.04
.04
,04 ,27
.02
-.14
.85 .68
Competitor orientation in the theater industry We pay close attention to competitors' fundraising activities. We keep a close eye on our competitors' audience development tactics. We monitor which plays are successful at other theaters.*
-.09 ,12
.07 .05
.87 .87
.07
Interfunctionat coordination in the theater industry Most departments at this theater get along well with each other. When members of several departments get together, tensions frequently run high. R Activities between artistic, production, and marketing departments are well coordinated.
.16 .11 .03
.04 .14
-.17
.10 -.07 .20
.80 .79 .71
Coefficient alpha
.86
.73
.73
.67
.05 ,11
f Denotes reverse-coded item. •This item was dropped because it loaded with the custonfier orientation factor. Loadings greater than .30 are in boidface and are bracketed for visuai emphasis.
TABLE A2 Exploring the Nomological Validity of the Four Scales by Examining Correlations with Conceptually Related Variables Conceptually Related Variables Number of plays obtained from playwrights. Number of plays obtained from publishers. Number of times theater shared mailing lists with competitors. The theater's artistic director and I have many interpersonal struggles. ^Significant at p < .01,
80 / Journal of Marketing, January 2000
Product Orientation
Customer Orientation
Competitor Orientation
Interfunctional Coordination
.583 -.26
-.27a .39a
.05 .01
.17 -.04
,19
-.09
.3ia
.22
-.21
-.06
-.02
-.42a
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