Strengthening the levels of food companies' market orientation - the road towards strengthening the competitiveness of agribusiness in Bosnia and Herzegovina

High level of trade deficit indicates low competitiveness in B&H agribusiness, which brings the question whether its low competitiveness is mirroring its low market orientation, i.e. capability to apply integrated business philosophy which ensures adequate competitive advantages and sustains development of companies. To answer that, a survey was conducted through a MKTOR scale for measuring market orientation, on fifty food companies in the period May – December 2013. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS, and it included reliability test, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, along with the tests of statistical significance and descriptive statistics. B&H food companies are only partly market-oriented, 3.430 (max 5.0), with Crombach’s Alpha of 0.943. Factor analysis revealed three market orientation factors: intelligence generation (0.393), intelligence dissemination (0.503) and responsiveness (0.522). Level of market orientation in small (3.511) and large (3.364) was statistically different, meaning that the smaller companies are less capable of understanding the market. Also, small and big companies have significantly different performances on the basis of all three market orientation factors. However, we may say that for both types of companies, intelligence generation and intelligence dissemination are a weak link, whereas responsiveness is better than total average. Results show that food companies in B&H have low ability of collecting key information about the market. Furthermore, omissions in internal organization and lack of knowledge about marketing are barrier to use efficiently the collected, often disorganized data on market necessities. Therefore existing, collected data are not utilized to enhance creative communication and building of added value that will make difference on market place and enable B&H food companies to develop sustainable competitive advantages.