The paper builds on a cross-sectional longitudinal study of 101 best Slovenian employers (firms) in a three-year period between 2008 and 2010. It employs both regression and power analysis (Cohen’s d effect size statistic). The paper analyzes the impact of internal and external marketing orientation, business innovation and HRM performance indicators on firm performance (added value per employee) in an economic crisis context. The effect size statistic further analyzes the link between the basic employee-firm relationship and the perceived importance of trust and long-term relationships with the firm in the “eyes of the customer”; as evaluated by respondent firms’ managers. The results of our analysis confirm the increasing importance of relationship orientation in an economic crisis. On the one hand both internal and external relationship orientation are closely linked, while on the other hand, only the internal relationship orientation (internal marketing) seems to be directly linked to firm performance in our OLS regression model. This does not by imply that external market orientation is not important, but may indicate that is acts more as a buffer, not as a productive source of firm performance in an economic crisis. In addition, the results of our effect size estimation show how market oriented firms also display significantly higher scores on the basic employee-firm relationship; indicating a significant effect size relationship between the two constructs. More interestingly, this effect size is almost identical for 2008 and 2010, but considerably higher for 2009, when the economic crisis in Slovenia reached its climax. In the end, a series of implications for marketing and management theory and practice are discussed.
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