D.Comm. (Business Management) / Market orientation is increasingly becoming recognized as the basis and the starting point of effective business management. It has received extensive publicity in recent years, indeed so much so that the notion that businesses need to respond to markets and satisfy their customers' needs seems to be so widely accepted now that it scarcely needs saying. As the marketplace evolves under the converging pressures of changing demographics, economics, technology, and social mores, so do organisations change, along with the nature of cooperation and competition among them. As organisations change, so must their management philosophies. To survive in the future, everybusiness will have to be customer focused and market-driven and flexible in its ability to deliver superior value to changing customers in the competitive marketplace. On the grounds of poor service rendered by South African enterprises in general and manufacturing enterprises in particular, the research problem chosen for this study was the cloud of suspicion hanging over the market orientation and quality of service characterising South African manufacturing enterprises. The main emphasis was on market orientation and more particularly on determining whether manufacturers of consumer and industrial products and the different branches of the manufacturing industry differed to a statistically significant extent in their market orientation. A questionnaire was sent to respondents by mail to collect the necessary information. Sections A, Band C of the questionnaire were subjected to factor analyses and coefficient alpha in order to determine the validity and dependability of the questionnaire. The statistical analyses revealed that the questionnaire has a high degree of internal validity and dependability. Besides determining normal descriptive statistics, such as frequencies, averages and standard deviations, routine statistical tests, such as t-tests, Chi-squared tests and variance analyses were performec' where necessary. A significance level of 0,05 was used throughout. In the case of significant variance analyses post-hoc Tukey tests were performed to determine which groups differ in their average scores for the dimensions of market orientation. It is concluded that South African manufacturing enterprises are not fully market oriented yet. A difference in market orientation between manufacturers of consumer and industrial products was found, namely that market orientation is more pronounced among manufacturers of industrial than of consumer products, albeit not to a statistically significant extent. It was also found that the branches of the manufacturing industry do not differ to an statistically significant extent regarding their market orientation. On balance it is clear that South African manufacturing enterprises will have to pay closer attention to the handling of complaints, to personnel focus and to internal as well as external communication if they are to become more market oriented.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:3852 |
| Date | 11 February 2014 |
| Creators | Kruger, Casper Paulus |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | University of Johannesburg |
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