Paper Title
The Impact On Food And Beverage Firm Performance: The Relationship Among Entrepreneurial Orientation, Customer Relationship Management And Service Innovation
Abstract
Globalization leads to increased competition and has great impact on the business environment of food and
beverage (F&B) industry. Hence, F&B firms continue to face globalization challenges generated by F&B multinational
enterprises, which enhances the need to meet consumer’s diversified demand. Therefore, F&B firms operate in a hyper-
competitive sector where innovating is often a condition for survival since the product life cycle is fairy short. How F&B
companies can maintain their competitiveness becomes an important issue; the improvement of innovation and customer
relationship management (CRM) prove to be a critical role to achieve competitive ability and firm performance. There has
been a wealth of researches on innovation, but few of them have been carried out from an entrepreneurial orientation (EO)
perspective. Despite the fact that study of innovation in service sector and the manufacturing sector has been gaining
momentum over the past few decades, investigations of the role of EO and innovation in organizations have mostly centered
on information and high-tech industry, with less attention to F&B industry. Nevertheless, innovation capability is one of the
main determinants of competitiveness in F&B industry, such as service innovation (SI). With a view to improving customer
satisfaction and gaining competitive advantage in the industry, enterprises have to apply proactive market orientation (MO)
strategies to their product and service.
The aim of this study is to examine the relationships among EO, SI and MO, and the mediating role of SI and MO between
EO and CRM/firm performance will be further discussed. In F&B industry, there is a positive relationship between EO and
overall firm performance, mediated by SI; and a positive relationship between EO and CRM is mediated by MO factors. By
applying CRM in F&B industry, a company could enhance its ability to achieve the ultimate goal of retaining customers and
better firm performance.
Keywords— Entrepreneurial Orientation, Service Innovation, Market Orientation, Customer Relationship Management,
Firm Performance.