Market Orientation Practices in Family Business Owner: The Generation Gap Perspective

Abstract

In the hyper-competition, every business organization, including family businesses have been demanded to develop the sources of competitive advantage. Some previous researches proved that market orientation has positive effects toward business performance and marketing competency. Market orientation as the culture plays important role to motivate employees throughout the organization to place the highest priority on the profitable creation and maintenance of superior customer value. Recently, as the internet technology has been recognized as the key business resources, the marketing effort must be integrated it, but unfortunately some of the old generation of the family business owner not concern about it. Is it any awareness and commitment gap in market orientation practice between old and young generation of the owner of family business? The objective of this research is to explore the awareness and the commitment of the owner to adopt market orientation and how to linkage it with internet technology. Research involved small family business owners in east Java. The research found that the understanding of market orientation in young generations is further and more comprehensive than the old generation. The young generation have many ideas and program to utilize internet as e-commerce linked with market orientation. They perceived that the company must relate the traditional face to face interaction via technology interface. From young generation perspective it is necessary for the management to extent of internet usage in marketing activities.