Column 4 · Market Orientation · Era 5, Assets and Accountability (2000s)
Proactive Market Orientation
Formulation, process · Landmark · Cluster II, Resources and Orientation
Description
They distinguished responsive market orientation, which addresses expressed customer needs, from proactive market orientation, which discovers and satisfies latent needs, and showed that the proactive form drives new product success.
Managerial Implications
Responsive market orientation satisfies expressed needs; proactive market orientation discovers latent needs customers cannot yet articulate. Only the proactive form predicts new product success. Build mechanisms for latent-need discovery: observing customers in use, working with lead users, and probing problems rather than asking for feature requests. Customers describe their present well; the firm must infer their future.