There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer…. It is the customer who determines what the business is…. Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two-and only these two-basic functions: marketing and innovation”
(Drucker, 1954, p.1)

In past two decades, there has been several researches focused on the concept of marketing orientation (MO), which aims to understand the effect of management culture or behaviour on organisational success (Narver and Slater 1990; Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Slater and Narver 1994a; Greenley, 1995). Even today, despite of growth of technology and entrepreneurship, marketing has been the most influential factor for the businesses around the world (Etgar et al., 1990; Gunaratne, 2015). The aim of this paper is to review and critically evaluate why marketing orientation is an inevitable factor for business performance. In order to do so, this paper will also analyse the importance of marketing orientation in an organisation structure and will evaluate how it is related or compared with other business orientations.
This paper is structured as the following, after introduction, the paper will discuss what is marketing orientation and how it’s a driving force for a business compared with other business orientations such as product, brand and learning orientations. Based on the above comparative study, the paper will then evaluate why marketing orientation is key for business performance by evaluating case studies from scholarly researches, followed by conclusion.

MARKETING ORIENTATION

Kohli and Jaworski (1990) defines marketing orientation as an organization’s wide generation of marketing intelligence, dissemination of marketing intelligence and marketing information across the departments, and organization wide responsiveness to market intelligence. In a corresponding study, Narver and Slater (1990) defined market orientation as the organizational culture that most effectively and efficiently creates the necessary behaviours for the creation of superior value for buyers and, thus, continuous superior performance for the business. According to them the concept of marketing is concerned with customer orientation, competitor orientation, inter-functional coordination, organisational culture and long-term focus. Over the years, researchers have deve