Although radical innovation is a prerequisite to sustain long-term competitive advantage for firms, they often fail to exploit technological opportunities that could lead to radical innovations due to their inability to properly evaluate market potential. This study focuses on marketing organizational structure and identifies three types of structures based on how marketing units are positioned within firms. Additionally, this research examines whether such positioning affects the frequency of radical innovations through market exploration. This study analyzed the data collected from 162 Japanese companies. The results show that the differences in the marketing-unit positioning influence market exploration. Furthermore, market exploration is positively related to the frequency of radical innovations.

Over the past two decades, several events have increased uncertainty, each of which has caused a decline in consumption and stagnation of firm growth. This study attempts to clarify the effects of customer satisfaction under such circumstances. In the field of marketing-finance interface research, it is widely recognized that customer satisfaction has a positive effect on firm performance. However, its effect under fluctuating uncertainty still needs to be fully understood. In this study, we examine the effect of customer satisfaction on the relationship between uncertainty and sales growth rate through a panel data analysis using the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (EPU Index), which is a quantitative measure of uncertainty. The results revealed that sales growth rate decreases with uncertainty, while customer satisfaction moderates the negative effects of uncertainty. These findings suggest that strong customer relationships can serve as a bulwark to prevent performance deterioration under conditions of increased uncertainty.