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.

Response format

5-point semantic differential (1 = primarily products, 5 = primarily customers)

Scale items

• The [sales/marketing] unit of our business unit/company aligns volume and revenue plans primarily by [1 = products, 5 = customers].
• The [sales/marketing] unit of our business unit/company aligns strategy definition primarily by [1 = products, 5 = customers].
• The [sales/marketing] unit of our business unit/company aligns performance evaluations primarily by [1 = products, 5 = customers].

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Composite reliability = .88. Validated in a sample of 337 senior marketing and sales executives across seven industry sectors in Europe. Scale is designed to be administered separately for both the marketing and sales unit; thought-world differences are then computed by squaring the difference between marketing and sales item scores (Tsui & O'Reilly, 1989 method). Mean differences in customer vs product orientation between marketing (M = 2.93) and sales (M = 3.25) were highly significant (p < .001). Differences in customer vs product orientation had a negative direct effect on cooperation quality (β = –.11, p < .01) but a positive direct effect on market performance (β = .14, p < .01), yielding a net positive total effect. Results validated against objective financial performance (return on sales) from company reports for 185 of the 337 SBUs.

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.

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