Do market oriented firms adopt Web 2.0 technologies? An empirical study in hospitality firms

Market Orientation (MO) has been of paramount importance for business performance, innovation, and marketing. It has called the attention of many researchers. Market orientation involves the generation of market intelligence, intelligence dissemination and responsiveness. Firms have been adopting different information technologies and the internet to generate and disseminate market intelligence. The Web 2.0 and its applications are being used by both customers and firms, and firms are adopting them to support different aspects of the organization. On the other hand, since users are generating enormous quantities of content on the internet it seems that a lot of market intelligence could be captured from the Web. Therefore, it was worth to ask if market oriented firms are adopting Web 2.0. This article studied the relationship between MO and the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the hospitality industry using a structural equation modeling approach and based on the findings the relation between MO and the adoption of Web 2.0 was confirmed. Finally conclusions and implications of the results are discussed and several lines of future research are suggested.