| The research stream relating to the marketing concept, market orientation, and customer orientation over the last forty plus years has yielded considerable progress in defining these domains and assessing their relationship to performance in a given industry or within a given firm. Recent research has begun to look at how these organizational orientations can be implemented (Day, 1994). Understanding the degree of implementation, or the extent to which a chosen orientation is being practiced across functional departments, strategic business units and management levels within a firm is paramount to achieving and sustaining a high level of the desired orientation. This study encompassed field research to measure the level of customer orientation of a candidate firm by surveying employees across all departments, strategic business units and hierarchical levels within one particular firm. This is the only true way of measuring the organization-wide (emphasis added), (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990) degree of customer orientation. The resulting measures provide insight into the differences and similarities between salaried employees of the studied firm whose jobs could best be described as either “marketing related” or “non-marketing related” and whose position could best be characterized as either “manager level or above” versus “below manager level”. Additionally, comparisons were made between strategic business units, length of service, and frequency of customer contact. Finally, the return of sales percentage for each respective strategic business unit of the studied firm is compared to the level of customer orientation within each of them to determine if any correlation exists. |