Orientação ao cliente e cultura organizacional : uma contribuição metodológica

Abstract

Customer orientation is known to be the key concept of marketing practices since the 1950's. The concept stated that the most important stakeholder of an organization would be the client, whose satisfaction should always be at the top of the organization's agenda. After 40 years, customer orientation is still the cornerstone of modern marketing, but satisfying a customer means more than attending needs; it means delivering value to customers in a continuous manner. The entire organization should be involved and engaged in the effort to develop this process by improving the day-to-day activities toward the client. In order to have the necessary commitment of the employees for a successful implementation of this concept, literature states that customer-oriented practices should be tied to corporate culture. This study deals with the first step for identifying cultural values that can contribute for an effective customer orientation and proposes to (1) explore the marketing concept, identifying the typical customer oriented behaviors and practices, (2) search for the cultural values and beliefs that support customer orientation and (3) develop an instrument to measure the cultural values and customer orientation constructs. Bibliographic researches along with qualitative research and scale analysis developed in previous studies have been used to develop this instrument. Once built, the instrument was also improved and validated through a field research with 250 managers and a statistical analysis of the collected data. The final result was an instrument composed of 3 factors and 22 statements to measure cultural values construct and 4 factors and 33 statements to measure customer orientation construct. This study brings methodological and practical contributions, and still provides a base for future researches that have the objective of testing the existing theoretical relation between cultural values and customer orientation constructs.