اهرم قابلیت های بازاریابی در سطح بنگاه با بازاریابی توسعه کارکنان

Using the theoretical foundations of the resource-based view of the firm, this study develops and measures marketing employee development capabilities and investigates how it moderates the relationships between brand and customer relationship management capabilities and firm performance outcomes. Based on a random sample survey of chief marketing executives from selected industries, combined with objective firm performance indicators and controls, results demonstrate that marketing employee development capabilities can leverage the relationships between firm-level marketing capabilities and customer satisfaction, market effectiveness, and objective financial performance. Further, these results show that such capabilities can be complementary and, in some cases, even substitute for each other, which improves organizational performance. Implications for researchers and marketing managers are discussed.

Marketing capabilities represent the accumulated knowledge and skills of the firm's marketing employees that are utilized to create customer satisfying outcomes and, ultimately, firm performance ( Day, 1994). Consequently, many resource-based view theorists consider employee resources as a key element in a firm's ability to create, maintain, and sustain valuable marketing and financial outcomes (e.g., Greenley et al., 2005 and Srivastava et al., 1998). Despite this seemingly obvious importance of a firm's employees as a route to improving marketing performance, relatively little empirical evidence exists at the firm level that examines this issue in the marketing context. Additionally, researchers have called for more investigation into how firms integrate the complementarities and substitutability of marketing capabilities and what effect this integration has on performance (e.g., Moorman and Slotegraaf, 1999 and Vorhies and Morgan, 2005). It is argued here that the skills and knowledge of marketing employees play an important role in such integration at the firm level by leveraging the relationship between marketing capabilities, marketing outcomes, and financial performance. Investigating the impact of the skills and knowledge of marketing employees on marketing and firm outcomes fills two gaps in the marketing literature. First, Vargo and Lusch (2004) argue that the potential new medium of exchange in marketing concerns specialized skills and knowledge in order to achieve competitive advantage. Understanding how firms can improve their competitive position in the marketplace via these skills and knowledge is thus an area of critical need since firm adaptation is viewed as dependent on marketing capability improvements (Day, 1994; Vorhies and Morgan, 2005). Second, although several studies have examined the impact of existing employee knowledge and skills on specific marketing outcomes (e.g., Chonko et al., 2003, Homburg and Stock, 2004 and Sergeant and Frenkel, 2002), little research has actually investigated how these knowledge and skills interact with marketing capabilities at the firm level and how they can influence overall firm performance. To address these gaps, the current study demonstrates that marketing employee knowledge and skills can leverage the relationships between important relational and reputational marketing capabilities and their impact on marketing outcomes and firm performance.

The results from this study demonstrate several interesting implications for researchers and marketing managers. First, the findings strengthen theories such as the “new dominant logic for marketing,” which states that customers do not buy goods or services, but instead, buy the intangible “value” that goods and services provide (e.g., Vargo and Lusch, 2004). This value that customers seek is created through an integration of the employees' skills and knowledge (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). In this study, improving marketing employee skills and knowledge indeed leads to value creation via improved utilization of marketing capabilities, customer satisfaction, market effectiveness, and, ultimately, firm performance. Second, the findings of this study also contribute to the call for more research that attempts to integrate marketing capabilities (e.g., Newbert, 2007 and Vorhies and Morgan, 2005) and acknowledge them as key aspects of a market-driven firm. Here, the work of resource-based view theorists in marketing and strategic management is acknowledged and incorporated (e.g., Chan et al., 2004 and Day, 1994) into the development of marketing employee development skills. In fact, a central proposition of resource-based view theory is that the inherent heterogeneity in human resources can create a competitive advantage (e.g., Wright, Dunford and Snell, 2001). However, in marketing, most research on employees adding value to the firm or creating a competitive advantage has been at the customer contact level or has only been studied in the sales and services context (e.g., Homburg and Stock, 2004). The results reported here support the value of marketing employees and extend previous research to the firm level. Finally, the results of this study shed light on calls for research to investigate the substitutability and complementarity of marketing capabilities. As the moderated regression analyses demonstrate, marketing capabilities can be leveraged by different levels of marketing employee development capabilities, thus supporting the notion of complementarity (e.g., Moorman and Slotegraaf, 1999 and Teece et al., 1997). Here, it is empirically demonstrated that the reputational resources deployed via brand management capabilities are enhanced when marketing employees have the knowledge and skills to do so. Interestingly, however, relational resources deployed via CRM capabilities may be a substitute for marketing employee development capabilities. This finding indicates that it may be important to have a strong CRM program in place when the capabilities to improve marketing employee knowledge and skills are lacking. Future studies need to investigate how CRM can replace low employee knowledge and skills. Future research is also needed to examine marketing employee development capabilities' role in various economic conditions. For example, Barney and Wright (1998) point out that most corporate annual reports state that the firm's employees are its most valuable asset. However, in troubled economic times, employees are generally the first thing to be cut, both in terms of downsizing and in terms of cutting training and benefits. Given the very recent recession and troubled economy, this hypothesis could be tested in future studies by using pre and post recession data. Additionally, future studies could help remedy some limitations with the present study. Future studies must continue to examine the role of substitutability and complementarity of capabilities. It is clear that capabilities have varying effects when utilized together. Also, while the data utilized in the current study are not strictly cross-sectional, they provide only a limited ability to impute causality. Future research could complement the present findings by utilizing longitudinal and time-series research designs that will both allow empirical verification of causality and make it easier to control for the effect of unobservables. Likewise, additional measures from secondary data could be incorporated in future studies. This would be particularly useful for measures such as customer satisfaction, which may have a higher degree of bias from the respondent. The results of this study also provide insight for marketing practitioners and address an issue that has been present in the popular press for some time, namely that an external, customer focus is not always enough to sustain a competitive advantage (Gitomer, 1998). Interestingly, some Fortune 500 companies such as IBM have already acknowledged and understood the importance of improving employee skills and knowledge. As one of their many new technological services offered, IBM is now selling “human capital management.” This service takes the knowledge of employees that are getting ready to retire, extracts the employee's knowledge, and saves it for later resource deployment. Organizations can, therefore, benefit from this knowledge resource long after the employee departs. If this study's results are any indication, implementing employee skill and knowledge development programs could result in huge payoffs for the firm wise enough to value marketing employee development capabilities.