5. Discussion
It is well established in the marketing literature that marketing capabilities affect firm performance. However, as our understanding of marketing capabilities becomes more nuanced, there is an increasing need to examine and compare the relative role various marketing capability types play in firm performance. Filling this gap, the current paper builds on Day's (2011) framework and compares empirically the effects of static, dynamic, and adaptive MCs under different levels of environmental turbulence. Using existing scales for static and dynamic MCs and the newly developed scale for adaptive MC from Study 1, we found that adaptive MC has the greatest impact on firm market performance, while static and dynamic MCs contributed equally to performance. This finding lends empirical support to Day's (2011) theoretical proposition that adaptive MC is the most important marketing capabilities in today's fast-changing market.
Interestingly, the relative dynamics of these effects change when the market environment becomes more or less turbulent. Under low environmental turbulence, static and dynamic MC are both essential to firm performance while adaptive MC has a negligible effect. In contrast, when environmental turbulence is high, dynamic and adaptive MCs become much more critical. In such situations, not only does static MC not help improve performance, but too much static MC actually hinders firm performance. As consumer demands are difficult to predict in a highly turbulent environment, too much emphasis on traditional marketing efforts (e.g., advertising and promotion) based on a firm's static MC can be easily misguided and may blind the firm's foresight into the uncertain future. These findings dispel the belief that all marketing capabilities are beneficial and the more the better, and suggest the need to adopt a firm's mix of marketing capabilities to the market the firm operates in.
