Authors : Muhammad Iskandar Hamzah, Abdul Kadir Othman and Faridah Hassan
Abstract: Over the past decade and during the early millennium, customer knowledge had received fair share of interest among the marketing academia. Having its origins deeply rooted from the Knowledge Management (KM) concept its deployment went beyond conventional themes such as human resources, organizational learning and management information systems. From the traditional KM perspective, organizational theorists believed that collective knowledge held by the employees about their work processes gave them specific advantage in getting them to improvise their tasks output. By adapting the same view into the marketing perspective, knowledge utilized by the employees about their customers is expected to help them in gaining longer relationships and better satisfaction from the customers. Therefore, customer knowledge is seen as customer-relationship specific information that is generated, shared and being acted upon. Such notions portrayed close resemblances with the market orientation concept which is widely used to illustrate market capabilities among firms. Since, the extant literature seldom delves into customer knowledge and market orientation concepts, this study intends to classify the various related constructs and models into a two-by-two matrix. The Customer Knowledge-Market Orientation (CK-MO) matrix is classified into customer knowledge process (input versus output) and contextual level (organizational versus individual). Based on the matrix, it is concluded that both customer knowledge and market orientation concepts are highly relevant and share common similarities. Thus, both concepts are ought to be integrated into a single holistic CK-MO view by researchers who wish to venture deeper into these fields. By using the term ‘integration’, this study does not intend to combine both concepts into a single construct but rather treat them as complementing concepts. The CK-MO matrix may also benefits practitioners in terms of weighing the benefits and risks posed by each models presented in the grid.
Muhammad Iskandar Hamzah, Abdul Kadir Othman and Faridah Hassan, 2017. Assimilating Customer Knowledge and Market Orientation into a Single Coherent Perspective: A Literature Analysis. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 12: 1355-1364.