Who’s the driver and who’s the passenger in the luxury industry? : a study of how internal factors influence a company’s marketing strategy

Today, it is important for companies to deliver superior customer value in order to be successful on the market. There are two different ways of achieving this advantage; a company can either follow a market driven approach or a market driving approach. The difference between these two approaches is that a market driven company listens to the customers’ demand and create superior customer value of their needs. On the contrary, a market driving company reshapes the market and offer new superior needs to customers that will be seen as a need by them. Furthermore, there is a gap of the influence the internal factors have on the market driven and the market driving approach. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide an insight of how the three internal factors, structure, financial resources and organization culture, influence the two approaches in the luxury industry. A survey was conducted in order to gather data from different companies worldwide. Both explanatory and exploratory research strategies were used when the collected data was analyzed. Explanatory research was used to test the hypothesis and explain the research question. Exploratory research was used to further understand how the internal factors influence a company’s marketing strategy. The result of this dissertation indicates that the three internal factors were not significantly connected with market driven or market driving approach. However, it can still be argued that the internal factor structure somehow is correlated with the market driven approach. Furthermore, the findings of this dissertation can be interesting for people who seek to investigate in both the concept of market orientation and how the internal factors influence it.