Marketing and Competitive Advantage: From Formation of Organizational Culture to Achieving Customer Value-based Advantage

One of the dominant paradigms in marketing strategy is achieving competitive advantage based on customer value. But the key challenge is how organizations can achieve value-based competitive advantage. The central theoretical contribution of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework that demonstrates how marketing through a series of causal chain can contribute to the competitive advantage of organizations. Based on this conceptual framework, the role of marketing initially begins with the formation of an organizational culture around two axes of market orientation and relational marketing. Then, formation of such a culture in the organization leads to the enhancing marketing resources. Resources alone are not effective in the performance of the organization; these resources show their impact when used in business processes. So we demonstrate how marketing resources exploited in business processes. These processes are a collection of strategic marketing capabilities that are categorized in different domains. Finally, it is shown that excellence in marketing capabilities leads to competitive advantage based on customer value.