A magyar élelmiszeripari kis- és középvállalatok piacorientációjának mérési módszerei

Abstract

Recently the small and middle size companies have been facing a rather stormy transformation period. They have the chance to gain prestigious positions just like their western partners but there also is the option of the complete capitulation in front of their superiority. Understanding the customers’ mind and integrating it into the enterprise everyday activities is becoming the key issue of surviving the competition of the market. The MARKOR and MKTOR scales are the tools to describe the positions of the companies in the evolving process. The database to be analyzed was collected using questionnaires covering 168 small or middle size enterprises of the food industry. The variable set consists of 49 variables according to the market orientation theory. Our aims in this paper are to complete the following two tasks: •identify the dimensionality of the dataset containing two groups of variable subsets, •investigate the discriminating ability of the subscales. The statistical analysis was carried out using structural equation modeling (SEM) method provided by the Amos 7.0 software. SEM is suitable for both exploratory and confirmative statistical analysis. During the analysis of the database we found that using successive elimination of variables from the multi item scale the rejection of the created unidimensional construct can not be justified statistically in five case out of the six subscales of the MARKOR and MKTOR scales. We also tested discriminating validity of the adapted subscales and concluded that the construct of the subscales are different significantly. After carefully examining the six sets of the individual variables belonging the adapted subscales some characteristics of the enterprises in question can be pointed out. These food industry firms concentrate on their competitors rather than on their customers. Their fact finding activity often covered by collecting secondary information using informal channels. Their marketing departments are usually isolated from the other parts of the companies. It was also found out that the adapted MARKOR and MKTOR scales along with the rest of the variables of the database will provide a sound base to further investigate the characteristics of the small and middle size enterprises of the Hungarian food industry.