Marketing Innovation as a Driver of Recovery in Post-CrisisEconomies

This study investigates the role of marketing innovation as a driver of recovery and resilience in post-crisis economies. The purpose is to determine whether firms that intensify marketing innovation achieve superior post-crisis outcomes, both in terms of recovery performance and organizational resilience. Drawing on the theory of crisis-driven innovation and the crisis-driven resilient innovation (CDRI) framework, a conceptual model was developed and tested. Data were collected through a structured online survey of 220 Romanian companies in multiple sectors between May and July 2025. Measurement scales for marketing innovation, recovery performance, and organizational resilience were validated using confirmatory factor analysis, and hypotheses were tested using multiple regression with robustness checks. The results indicate that marketing innovation has a positive and statistically significant effect on both recovery performance (β = 0.59, p < 0.001) and organizational resilience (β = 0.54, p < 0.001), explaining 42% and 38% of the variance, respectively. These findings remain robust to alternative model specifications, multicollinearity diagnostics, heteroskedasticity tests, and influence analyses. The study concludes that marketing innovation acts not only as a short-term lever for market recovery but also as a long-term capability that strengthens resilience, enabling firms to adapt more effectively to future disruptions. These results contribute to the literature by integrating marketing innovation into resilience theory and provide actionable implications for managers and policy makers seeking to accelerate economic renewal and build crisis-ready organizations.