Creating Proactive Customer Orientation: A Managerial Roadmap

In the previous chapters, insights about climate and processes that lead to proactive customer orientation, the performance implications resulting from proactive customer orientation, organizational antecedents that support a proactive customer orientation and organizational characteristics that determine the relative importance of proactive customer-oriented climate and proactive customer-oriented processes have been achieved. However still little is known of how firms may systematically achieve a high level of proactive customer orientation, and about typical patterns of market-based innovations that firms may follow. Thus the first part of this chapter develops a systematic change process to increase proactive customer orientation, based on the qualitative as well as quantitative inquiries of this work. The obtained insights suggest four-steps to develop and benefit from proactive customer orientation. The second part consists of a cluster analysis resulting in different patterns of market-based innovations. The third part introduces typical firms for each pattern and provides situation-specific recommendations of how firms should optimize their proactive customer orientation.