Abstract:
Customers expect value addition from their marketers. According to
Narver and Slater (1990) organizations have to be customer oriented to ensure superior
value to their customers. Thus customer orientation is the prime element of marketing
concept, therefore market oriented business adopt company wide customer orientation.
Narver and Slater (1990) defined customer orientation as "the sufficient understanding
of one's target buyers to be able to create superior value for them continuously" (p. 21).
Thus customer oriented marketer has to understand needs, wants, preferences,
expectations, behavior, and perception etc of their customers. Meanwhile consumers
are becoming socially conscious and they favour socially responsible business
organizations. As a result customers have social expectations over their marketers;
therefore it seems that customer orientation is influencing on socially responsible
business behavior. But so far no research has been conducted to examine the influence
of customer orientation on corporate social responsibilities in Sri Lankan banking
sector. Therefore main purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of customer
orientation on corporate social responsibilities in Sri Lankan banking sector. Hence
findings of this study would be useful to the Sri Lankan banks to enhance socially
responsible business behavior.
This research was limited to the Sri Lankan banking sector which consists of
commercial banks and specialized banks. Thus 22 commercial banks and 13 specialized
banks were considered for this study. Researcher adopted quantitative methodology and
used structured questionnaires for data collection. Multiple linear regression techniques
were used for data analysis. Results showed that customer orientation significantly
influences corporate social responsibilities, therefore, it can be concluded that an
organization can enhance its corporate social responsibility by adopting customer
oriented practices.
