What Kind of Market Orientation Exists in Finnish Research Libraries? Implications for Managing Customer Knowledge and Relationships

摘要

Market orientation refers to the implementation of the marketing concept. There is paucity of such studies in the library literature that have attempted to measure market orientation. This paper addresses some conceptual and measurement issues relatedto the study of market orientation in the context of Finnish libraries. The study is based on the notion that a leader in an organization can have large impact on its culture. The libraries are divided into three categories based on their level of market orientation: strong, medium and weak. Six different dimensions such as customer philosophy, inter-functional coordination, strategic orientation, responsiveness, competition orientation and pricing orientation are identified as the dimensions of market orientation of libraries. These dimensions have got fairly high score in strong market oriented libraries which is significantly quite low in medium and weak market oriented libraries. The implications of the findings are discussed.