Strategic Change Capability in Marketing Organizations: Conceptualization, Scale Development, and Validation

In dynamic and uncertain business environments, marketing organizations need to be constantly ready to enact strategic changes. However, a robust measure for capturing the organizational capabilities and underlying marketing activities required to achieve effective marketing-related strategic changes is lacking. This study addresses this gap by developing a measurement tool for strategic change capability (SCC). Drawing on interviews with marketing consultants and senior marketing managers, the authors conceptualize SCC as a multidimensional dynamic marketing capability that comprises five dimensions: establishing the business case for change, preparing employees for change, setting up the organization for implementing change, institutionalizing change, and assessing and adjusting implementation. Following rigorous scale development procedures—including (1) item generation, (2) expert evaluation, (3) scale purification, (4) scale validity, (5) nomological and predictive validity, and (6) scale generalizability studies—a psychometrically sound and reliable measure of SCC is developed. The SCC scale facilitates different types of strategic marketing change and predicts performance outcomes better than established constructs (i.e., strategic flexibility, agility, adaptiveness, and responsiveness). This study contributes to the dynamic capabilities theory and provides empirically substantiated guidance for marketing organizations on how to prepare for and effectively enact strategic changes in dynamic business environments.