Innovative companies after the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic are undergoing significant changes: from new trends in the markets to the growth of remote work in the digital environment. At any stage of development, innovative companies need an adaptive marketing approach to the implementation of the planned strategy. Marketing solutions to the problems of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment (VUCA) in 2023 can rightfully be considered an emergency aid to innovative transformations in emerging markets. The triad “market orientation – innovation – performance” chain has been extended to various innovation types– from technological and product innovation to innovation orientation and capability. Moreover, the market orientation research agenda has, during last 10 years, highlighted customer orientation as a key component of market orientation that drives innovative activities.

Specifics of emerging markets raise some questions on the applicability of wellestablished marketing concepts and scales, widely used in the developed markets, in the context of emerging markets. Over the past twenty years emerging markets have remained one of the main focus of marketing research. The interest of the researchers to the emerging markets is not accidental, it is caused by the peculiarities of the developing markets. Specific features of the emerging markets challenge the use of approaches designed for developed markets in emerging markets. Existing research describes peculiarities of emerging markets and shows the evidence of inability to use the theories designed in the developed markets in emerging markets (Burgess, Steenkamp, 2006; Sheth, 2011). The external environment and the increasing competition force companies to rethink their marketing activities and seek new sources of competitive advantages, and one of the primary tasks for the company is the development of customer orientation (Jacob, 2006; Ellis, 2006; Frambach, Fiss, Ingenbleek, 2016). Customer orientation (CO), as one of the key concepts of contemporary marketing, requires rethinking in the context of emerging markets (Sheth, 2011; Roersen, Kraaijenbrink, Groen, 2013; Smirnova, Rebiazina, Frosen, 2018). The purpose of this paper is to develop a tool for a complex evaluation of the company’s CO adapted to the specifics of the Russian emerging market. The empirical study includes mixed qualitative-quantitative design: at the first stage a quantitative survey with representatives of 239 companies operating in the Russian market, and at the second - 62 in-depth interviews were conducted to test the CO scale’s applicability to the Russian market.

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.