Abstract:
Customer focus being at the heart of a market orientation, a market-oriented
organization is committed to generate superior value for customers. The Internet
shows a great potential for information acquisition, sharing and dissemination, all of
which are essential processes of market orientation. Yet, the emerging role of the
Internet as a new and revolutionary way of performing market orientation has been
patchy, with lacuna of theoretical frameworks and models. The nature of market
orientation on the Internet particularly the mechanisms and intermediated variables
underlying the relationship between market orientation and customer perceived value
on the Internet remains an area of ambiguity. Drawing upon the market orientation
theory and the consumption-values theory, the conceptual framework conjectures the
mechanism underlying the relationship between market orientation and customer
perceived value on the Internet with the use of a mediator called information-based
value creation. Following the positivistic research paradigm and quantitative research
design, face-to-face questionnaire survey was adopted. In order to meaningfully
measure the research gap, a research setting where both sides of the service exchange
are in a qualified position to assess the relationship between market orientation and
customer perceived value was required. Data stemmed from 116 hotels, involving 116
managers and 644 tourists were used to assess the proposed relationships in the hotel
industry in Sri Lanka using Partial Least Squares–Structural Equation Modelling. The
findings demonstrate that the relationship between market orientation and customer
perceived value on the Internet is mediated by information-based value creation in a
complementary pattern. Moreover, the findings indicate that the proposed framework
explains 96.6% of the variance in information-based value creation and 92.2% of the
variance in customer perceived value, providing strong evidence of its explanatory
power. The findings are useful for hotels to deliver superior value to their customers
through proper integration of the Internet into market orientation process. The
significance of this study stems from theory triangulation. Dyadic data collection and
Partial Least Squares–Structural Equation Modelling are significant and novel
contributions in terms of methodology.
