Customer vs Product Orientation of Marketing/Sales Unit

What it measures

Measures the extent to which a marketing or sales department aligns its volume and revenue plans, strategy definition, and performance evaluations around customer-related rather than product-related strategies, plans, and goals. The scale is administered separately for the marketing unit and the sales unit within the same organisation; thought-world differences between departments can be computed as squared differences between marketing and sales item scores, following Homburg and Jensen's (2007) method. A higher score reflects a stronger customer orientation relative to product orientation for the focal unit. In the original study, sales units scored more customer-oriented and marketing units more product-oriented, consistent with prior theoretical accounts.

Representative items

• The [sales/marketing] unit of our business unit/company aligns volume and revenue plans primarily by [products ... customers].
• The [sales/marketing] unit of our business unit/company aligns strategy definition primarily by [products ... customers].
• The [sales/marketing] unit of our business unit/company aligns performance evaluations primarily by [products ... customers].

Citation

Homburg, C., & Jensen, O. (2007). The thought worlds of marketing and sales: Which differences make a difference? Journal of Marketing, 71(3), 124–142.