Being customer-focused and result-oriented as an organization is undoubtedly a recipe for business success. Those are also some of the key characteristics of the market culture. Let’s dive into all you need to know about the market culture and how to promote aspects of the market culture within your organization to become a more competitive and profitable business.
What is Market Culture?
Market culture has one goal: to have high-profit margins and outperform the competition. Therefore, it is results-oriented with a strong external focus to satisfy the customers. This culture is frequently a competitive environment, even among colleagues, and attracts talent who want to "be the best".
In a market culture, managers and leadership are inspiring yet demanding and expect their staff to perform excellently in this high-pressure environment. This kind of culture is most commonly found in large businesses across different industries, such as big tech, aerospace, media, and entertainment.
Key Characteristics of Market Culture
Competitiveness: Market culture emphasizes the competitiveness between the organization and its competitors and between employees. Internally, overcompetitiveness can cause an issue because staff cannot collaborate well. Many consulting companies and law firms are renowned for this kind of environment.
Results Orientation: Market culture heavily focuses on performance, results, and achievements. Success is defined by profit and market penetration. One company that is very well known for being results-focused is Amazon. According to a book written by two Amazon employees called "Working Backwards," Amazon uses a process improvement method called DMAIC which stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. The team then creates a Metric Owner that will look at the results daily to see what can be improved.
Customer Focus: Customers are at the center of how a company with a prevalent market culture makes decisions. This includes products, in-store experience, online experience, and customer service. It involves a lot of customer research but is hugely important to the company’s success. Amazon's current mission statement is, "To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices".
Getting Things Done: Finishing the work is very important in the market culture. In this culture, staying late or working outside of working hours to get things done is often celebrated and seen as required to achieve business goals.
Advantages of Market Culture
Productivity and Profitability: The focus on performance, results, and competitiveness helps the employees become more productive and the organization more profitable. Often, teams in this type of corporate culture meet their targets and exceed expectations.
Continuous Improvement: Due to the intense focus on the customer, market company culture compels organizations to continuously improve their products and services. For example, think about the various ways the iPhone was redesigned inside and out and the massive following Apple received from this improvement mindset.
Ambitious Employees: Driven employees who thrive in the market culture are also performance-oriented and productive, which benefits the bottom line. This culture unites teams to pursue big wins, which can be a rewarding environment for employees.
Disadvantages of Market Culture
Toxic Work Environment: Market company culture can potentially create a toxic working environment. It can lead to unhealthy competition bordering on obsession, knowledge-hiding, working long hours, etc. Also known as a cut-throat environment, only a select few team members will be able to climb to the top of the corporate ladder, and the rest will burn out.
Employee Stress and Burnout: Such an unhealthy environment leads to employees being stressed and eventually having a burnout because of the pressure being put on them. Additionally, employee turnover can cost an organization a lot of money.
Costs: Maintaining a market culture with a solid external orientation is not cheap. You need to invest a lot of money into market and customer research and constant product iterations. Additionally, it is increasingly important to invest in technological infrastructure to collect, analyze, and use customer data.
How HR Can Help Promote Aspects of Market Culture
While the market culture certainly has its challenges, fostering certain aspects of it such as healthy competition and strong customer orientation can help your organization serve its customers better and achieve higher profits.
Adjust Your Compensation Strategy: In this type of culture, it’s important to have a compensation strategy that focuses on rewarding people based on their performance and results. Reward top performers with larger salaries, salary increases, and bonuses based on results. Offer prestigious opportunities to top performers, like paying for their MBA.
Highlight Results and Achievements: Work on an employee recognition program based on achieving results and hitting the targets. Implement a recognition program tailored to your unique work environment to ensure it delivers the desired result.
Foster Customer Orientation: Provide employees across different departments with ample opportunities to understand the needs of customers and serve them better. This could include training on product knowledge, working with customer feedback, and showing empathy. Create a system to reward employees for their exceptional customer-focused behavior.
Hire Driven People: Set selection criteria that help you assess candidates based on relevant characteristics, such as how goal- and results-oriented they are. Ask interview questions that gauge candidates' achievements, goal-setting abilities, and commitment to going above and beyond.
Develop Strong Leaders: Identify future leaders and create leadership development plans for them. Provide leadership coaching opportunities to current leaders to ensure they can motivate and effectively lead their workforce.
Promoting some aspects of the market culture within your organization can help your employees and your organization perform better and achieve a larger market share. However, it's important to find the right balance between focusing on performance and achievements and building a healthy, supportive organizational culture.
