The emerging capabilities approach to strategy offers a new perspective on how to achieve and sustain a market orientation.
This approach seeks the sources of defensible competitive positions in the distinctive, difficult-to-imitate capabilities the organization has developed.
Two capabilities are especially important in bringing these external realities to the attention of the organization. One is the market sensing capability, which determines how well the organization is equipped to continually sense changes in the market and to anticipate the responses to marketing actions. The second is a customer-linking capability, which comprises the skills, abilities, and processes needed to achieve collaborative customer relationships so individual customer needs are quickly apparent to all functions and well-defined procedures are in place for responding to them.