Marketing Capabilities

Vorhies and Morgan identified eight marketing capabilities (pricing, product development, channel management, marketing communication, selling, market information management, planning, and implementation) and benchmarked firms against top performers to show their link to business performance. The contribution was less the list than the method: capabilities became something a firm could be scored on, which made the resource-based view operational for marketing.

All six cells in the Inputs block, no drift. The family has asked one question since Alderson, what inside the firm produces advantage, with the answer migrating from assets to positions to capabilities to adaptiveness.

One curated link out, to Strategy-Structure Fit (organization configurations are assessed against capabilities), and 17 deep-dive mentions in nine families. Its most active export market is international marketing: born globals, multinationality and capabilities, export strategy implementation, and international marketing capabilities all name it.

One curated link in, from the Marketing Mix (Mx): the eight capabilities are the mix executed. The anchor cites 17 other anchor works, the most of any of the ten with Market-Based Assets, including Day and Wensley (1988), Day (1994), Hunt and Morgan (1995), both market orientation anchors, March (1991), and the ACSI paper (1996). The list was assembled from four families' landmarks.

29 anchor works in 11 families cite it; seven Core cells hold one: Adaptive Capabilities (Day, 2011), Performance Outcomes (Katsikeas et al., 2016), Marketing Excellence (Homburg, Theel, and Hohenberg, 2020), CSR and Market Value, Manager-Customer Gap, Strategy-Structure Fit, and Market-Focused Sustainability. Less expected: CMO Presence (Nath and Mahajan, 2008), the Marketing-Sales interface (Hughes, Le Bon, and Malshe, 2012), and Resource-Based Theory in Marketing (Kozlenkova, Samaha, and Palmatier, 2014).