MARKOR — Market Orientation Scale

What it measures

Measures market orientation as a set of organisational processes — intelligence generation, dissemination, and responsiveness — rather than as a cultural disposition. Intelligence Generation captures organisational activities to generate intelligence about current and future customer needs and competitive forces. Intelligence Dissemination captures how widely generated intelligence is shared across departments. Responsiveness captures the degree to which the organisation selects target markets and designs and delivers offerings in response to market intelligence. MARKOR operationalises Kohli & Jaworski's (1990) JM conceptualisation of market orientation as actionable cross-functional processes — more diagnostic than MKTOR's cultural approach and better suited to identifying specific improvement opportunities.

Response format

Likert (1–5, strongly disagree to strongly agree)

Representative items

• In this business unit, we meet with customers at least once a year to find out what products or services they will need in the future. (Intelligence Generation)
• We are slow to detect changes in our customers' product preferences. (R, Intelligence Generation)
• When something important happens to a major customer or market, the whole business unit knows about it quickly. (Dissemination)
• It takes us forever to decide how to respond to competitors' price changes. (R, Responsiveness)
• We periodically review our product development efforts to ensure alignment with customer needs. (Responsiveness)

Usage notes & scoring

(R) = reverse-scored. Three subscale scores and composite. Short forms of 10–20 items are frequently used. Responsiveness is the weakest link in most organisations' market orientation. MKTOR and MARKOR correlate at 0.60–0.70 and are sometimes used together for comprehensive market orientation profiling.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Kohli, A.K., Jaworski, B.J., & Kumar, A. (1993). MARKOR: A measure of market orientation. Journal of Marketing Research, 30(4), 467–477.

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