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Driven by increasingly global and competitive markets, organizations are striving to better understand the drivers of market performance. Market orientation and an outward customer focus have been recognized as key drivers in market performance (e.g., Day 1990). Yet, past research into market orientation and firm or SBU performance has shown inconsistencies in predicting performance based on a direct path from market orientation to performance. While the connection of orientation to performance is generally accepted (Deshpandé and Farley 1996), some studies have found mixed results (Jaworski and Kohli 1993), and others found non-significant or negative relationships (Greenley 1995; Voss and Voss 2000). In all past studies, the importance of customer value or creating value for the customer as part of market orientation has been mentioned, but not studied separately from the orientation scale. Resource-Advantage theory (Hunt and Morgan 1995 and 1996) suggests that knowledge about customers and the market leads to being able to create value which in turn leads to improved firm performance. This study fills a void in the marketing literature by explicitly bringing customer value to the forefront in the market orientation/performance chain and establishing the increased explanatory power of a model that includes customer value separately from market orientation. We propose that value should be removed from the market orientation scales and promoted to a mediational position between market orientation and performance. With empirical testing, we show that value fully mediates the orientation to performance relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]