Analysing the Market Orientation’s Effects on Economic Performance in Insurance Companies

Subject Areas : Futurology

M. A. Abdolvand, ¹ (ندارد)
K. Heidarzadeh ² (نویسنده مسئول یا طرف مکاتبه)
H. Manafi ³ (ندارد)

Received: 2008-12-14 Accepted : 2009-02-09 Published : 2010-06-22

Keywords: service, Market orientation, Service Quality, relationship orientation, Customer loyalty, economic performance, insurance,

Abstract :

The question of why some service organization are able to achieve superior performance continues toattention from both academics and practitioners. There are two key aspects to this question :1- what are the sources of advantages that are important in achieving superior performance in serviceorganizations2- and how are these sources of advantages converted into superior performance.In the service context, organizational culture and vision are particularly important. However, threemarket-related sources of advantages which marketing literature has largely focused on, are marketorientation, branding and innovation.Market orientation can be defined as a strategy used to reach a sustainable competitive advantagebased on the generation and use of information within organization, and on the selection of markets tobe satisfied. In this framework, we believe that competitive advantages results from the use marketorientation philosophy in an organization. Sustainability is achieved because the performance of themarket orientations’ behaviours requires complex organizational knowledge that cannot easily beimitated by competitors.Market orientation in an insurance industry is a business culture that is geared to providing ongoingsuperior products and services to the customers in that industry.The current work aims to analyze the effects of relationship and service – quality orientation andloyalty on market and economic performance and their mediating role in the relationship betweenmarket orientation and economic performance .In order to test the hypotheses proposed, an empirical analysis for insurance company was conducted.Therefore, the behavioural pattern of a sample population of Parsian insurance’s agents in Iran, and inrelation to factors influencing the extent of economic performance, were considered, so to correlate theeffect of each variable factor with the outcome.Within the context, both exploratory and practical research methodologies were utilized to arrive atconclusive data that in alliance with the structural equation model to effectively attest a meaningfulcorrelation between the outline influential factors and the real extent of the effect of market orientationon economic performance .This work integrates market orientation philosophy with relationship marketing and service qualityand loyalty as related drivers of the forms performance.