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This paper aims to propose a new country-level construct, national customer orientation, to provide a benchmark for global headquartered managers’ decisions and scholars investigating cross-national research.

A conceptual framework and unique propositions are developed that focus on how one macro-economic driver, e.g. the wealth of a country, and one macro-marketing driver, e.g. customer price sensitivity, affect national customer orientation during and after global economic downturns such as recessions and a pandemic.

An agenda setting section proposes distinct theoretical, empirical and managerial themes for future research aimed at testing the propositions at the country and organization levels over time.

Although the new construct offers substantial benefits for scholars and managers, current measures of national customer orientation are limited to data provided by the World Economic Forum or expensive primary survey-based research that restrict the number of countries, respondents and time periods.

The new national-level customer orientation construct and propositions about its drivers over time promise to provide global managers a country-level customer-based benchmark so that they can better understand, set expectations and manage customer orientation across different countries over time.

Research on market and customer orientation is consistently designated a priority by academics and practitioners. However, most previous studies exclusively focus at the micro organizational-level, with less known on how customer orientation varies at the macro country-level and over time.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework, in an effort toward building a contingent theory of drivers and consequences of managerial metric use in marketing mix decisions, this paper develops a conceptual framework to test whether the relationship between metric use and marketing mix performance is moderated by firm and managerial characteristics.

Based on reviews of the marketing, finance, management and accounting literatures, and homophily, firm resource- and decision-maker-based theories and 22 managerial interviews, a conceptual model is proposed. It is tested via generalized least squares – seemingly unrelated regression estimation of 1,287 managerial decisions.

Results suggest that the impact of metric use on marketing mix performance is lower in firms which are more market oriented, larger and with worse recent business performance and for marketing and higher-level managers, while organizational involvement has a lesser nuanced effect.

While much is written on the importance of metric use to improve performance, this work is a first step toward understanding which settings are more difficult than others to accomplish this.

Results allow identification of several conditional managerial strategies to improve marketing mix performance based on metric use.

This paper contributes to the metric literature, as prior research has generally focused on the development of metrics or the linking of marketing efforts with performance metrics, but paid little attention to understanding the relationship between managerial metric use and performance of the marketing mix decision and has not considered how the relationship is moderated by firm and managerial characteristics.