Winning over the market orientation trap : an evolutionary perspective on the deliberate iteration between market driving and market-driven orientations

The concept of market orientation (MO) has received widespread attention within the literature on marketing, strategy and innovation during past decades. More recent developments within the debate have given rise to explaining MO by disentangling the construct into two conceptually distinct perspectives of agency—market driving, and market-driven behavior. Although these two strategic orientations are considered highly complementary, the relatedness and dynamics between them largely remains a ‘black box’: the questions of how, when, and under which specific environmental conditions they can be combined to achieve better overall performance, has remained largely understudied. Against this background, our study introduces a novel, previously neglected perspective on MO: the dimension of time. Building on a longitudinal, embedded case study examining a leading European state-owned telecom operator over a perspective of 22 years, we develop a process study to further uncover the dynamics pertinent to MO, thereby gaining a richer and more multifaceted understanding of how different forms of MO unfold and interact. We offer two main propositions. First, we theorize on the gradually shifting co-evolution of proactive and reactive positioning within MO. Second, we identify effects of lock-in created in the transition from market driving to market-driven phases, leading to what we refer to as the “MO trap”. We contribute to connecting the dots between theories of marketing strategy and industry dynamics, and offer managerial implications.