In addition to verifying the potential value of benchmarking
marketing capabilities, our study reveals new insights into
how managers can benchmark marketing capabilities to
achieve sustainable competitive advantage. First, we
demonstrate how profile deviation can be used as a tool for
undertaking the search and gap-assessment stages of benchmarking.
Profile deviation enables managers to calibrate the
value potential of improving individual marketing capabilities
or sets of them. It is also flexible enough to allow the
benchmarking of more content-focused areas, such as marketing
organization design (e.g., Vorhies and Morgan 2003),
or hybrid content- and process-related phenomena, such as
the marketing capabilities of top-performing firms in specific
industries or strategy-type groups or even those of
highly market-oriented firms. In practice, benchmarking
consortia such as those organized by the American Productivity
and Quality Center and others may provide members
with samples that may be suitable for using profile deviation
to benchmark marketing capabilities. For example,
using standardized measures of various marketing processes,
the United Kingdom’s Chartered Institute of Marketing
is developing a database of the marketing capabilities
of medium-sized firms (Woodburn 1999).