Market orientation and hotel performance: The mediating effect of creative marketing programs

Abstract This work investigates the indirect effects between market orientation and hotel performance through creative marketing programs. The focus is on exploring the indirect effects between 1) customer orientation, competitor orientation, and cross-functional integration; and 2) hotel financial performance through two aspects of creative marketing programs, namely, novelty and meaningfulness. Through an empirical analysis using structural equation modeling, we discovered four mediation phenomena in the hotel industry: customer orientation positively correlates to a hotel's financial performance through the meaningfulness and novelty of marketing programs, but competitor orientation and cross-functional integration contribute to the hotels' performance only via the meaningfulness of such programs. Furthermore, it was observed that customer orientation plays the most important role in market orientation, in terms of how well a hotel performs. These findings are used to discuss managerial implications and future research directions.