The concept of customer orientation (CO) has been studied for quite a long time at first as a major part of market orientation and then as a separate construct. For emerging market the role of CO became paramount with the shift from the planned to the market economy. However, after more than two decades of transition Russian companies are still demonstrating rather a claim of being customer orientation, instead of implementing a long-term orientation towards customer. This paper focuses on reconsidering applying the Narver and Slater (1990) approach to conceptualizing and measuring customer orientation, and its empirical test and validation in the context of Russian economy. This study is based on data from two empirical studies on Russian companies, conducted during the pre-crisis (2008) and post-crisis (2010) period. Our results reveal that existing theory on customer orientation is not fully confirmed by the evidence from Russian companies.