Abstract

With the deepening application of information technology in economic field and the accelerating development of economic globalization, market demands not only diverse and differentiated, but also complex, disorderly, changeable. In this background, dramatic changes in the market environment posed a severe challenge to the enterprises'marketing management. Traditional marketing mix lost its original role, and company's marketing innovation could not keep up the speed of market changes. From a global perspective, we also found that some superior business entities, even well-known Fortune 500companies, decayed now though they have a systematic strategy making process. The key reason is that they failed to change their traditional mode of marketing strategy, forward-looking and proactively predict and adapt to the market environment's impending changes. In recent years, researches have showed that not only overload information will lead to the loss of information processing capabilities, but also enterprises'path dependence, behavioral inertia and structuralisolationwill bring organization rigidities and action lag to the enterprises. Scholars have pointed out there is a widening gap between marketing capability of corporate and the changes in the market. Enterprises can close this gap only through continuous vigilant market learning and predicting, marketing experiments and open network marketing to improve their marketing capability and generate an adaptive state to the changeable market environment.

Today, business environment is not only filled with a variety of opportunities but also hidden with numerous threats. Every company can not rely solely on their own resources and abilities to achieve value of opportunity and reduce costs of threats because of its resource constraints. Cooperation is a common phenomenon between enterprises, including the exchanges of resources, joint development of products or services, information and knowledge sharing, and so on. Even though firms with a high degree of vigilance and operational flexibility can not catch up with the market changes without the coordination and support from each other between firm network relationships. Thus, enterprises should build an effective and efficient firm network in order to develop and improve their adaptive marketing capability.

Although there were a lot of theoretical and empirical studies on static anddynamic marketing capability, adaptive marketing capability is still a new construct very few scholars studied on. Scholars has not disclosed the connotation and elements of adaptive marketing capability and discussed about the essential difference between adaptive, static and dynamic marketing capability. In this paper, the author defined that adaptive marketing capability is a foresight, proactive and outside-in integrative capability including vigilant learning, marketing experiment and open network marketing capabilities. Through theoreticalcom-parative analysis, this paper proposed that adaptive marketing capability is different from static and dynamic marketing capability in the aspects of theoretical basis, environment awareness, analyzing perspectives, strategic focus and main content. Under different level of market uncertainty, three kinds of marketing capabilities will make different impacts on firm performance. By integrating adaptive marketing capability theory and firm network theory, this study analyzed the effects that firm vertical and horizontal network execute on adaptive marketing capability and firm performance. Further more, we examined the moderating role of corporate entrepreneurship in this influencing mechanism.

In this paper, two theoretical models were developed. The first one is the comparison model of three kinds of marketing capabilities' impact on firm performance. The second one is the influencing mechanism model of firm network acts on adaptive marketing capability and firm performance. In the empirical work, this paper studied on 225 manufacturing enterprises from Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang by 6 months of in-depth interviews and surveys. The hypotheses in this study were tested statistically by using SPSS 19.0, AMOS 18.0 and EVIEWS 7.0. The results showed that the theoretical frameworks were mainly supported. First, this paper found that there was a good discriminate validity between adaptive marketing capability, static marketing capability and dynamic marketing capability. Despite static and dynamic marketing capability also have positive effects on firm performance, the coefficient of adaptive marketing capability is significantly greater than that of static and dynamic marketing capability. Moreover, market uncertainty moderate the relationship between adaptive marketing capability and firm financial and market performance positively, but negatively moderate the relationship between static marketing capability and market performance and the relationship between dynamic marketing capability and financial performance. It means that the positive effects of adaptive marketing capability will increase, while the positive effects of static and dynamic marketing capability will diminish when the uncertainty of market increase. Second, this paper studied on the influencing mechanism of vertical and horizontal firm network execute on adaptive marketing capability and firm performance by introducing the moderator of corporate entrepreneurship. Empirical results showed that the scope and quality of firm network had positive effects on adaptive marketing capability, financial performance and market performance. Corporate entrepreneurship negatively moderated the relationship between the scope of vertical network and adaptive marketing capability and the relationship between the quality of horizontal network and adaptive marketing capability. Oppositely, corporate positively moderated the relationship between the quality of vertical network and adaptive marketing capability and the relationship between the scope of horizontal network and adaptive marketing capability. It means that companies with much more innovative, active and risk taking spirit should pay more attention to strengthen the quality of vertical network and expand the scope of horizontal network in order to foster adaptive marketing ca pability.

In summary, this paper studied on the difference between three kinds of marketing capabilities and the influencing mechanism firm vertical and horizontal networks execute on adaptive marketing capability and firm performance theoretically and empirically based on marketing capability theory, complex adaptive system theory and firm network theory by integrating the theories of corporate entrepreneurship and market uncertainty. From the theoretical perspective, this is not only a new attempt to integrate the various theories, but also an effective complement and extend to marketing capability theory and firm network theory. So it has an important theoretical significance. From the practical perspective, this paper will not only help enterprises develop marketing capability according to market uncertainty, but also help enterprises adjust and optimize firm network structure to achieve their business objectives according to their own corporate entrepreneurship. So it also has a profound practical significance. Of course, there are some limitations in this study, which will be further refined in future studies.

Keywords: Adaptive Marketing Capability; Firm Network; Firm Perform-ance