Strategic marketing innovations and organizational performance of commercial banks in South-South, Nigeria

With the new dynamic and competitive banking environment, commercial banks now have to think in term of marketing innovations to develop its performance in order to remain profitable. This study examined the relationship between strategic marketing innovations and commercial banks' performance in South-South, Nigeria with the moderating effect of environment dynamism. This study was conducted using the theories of resource-based view theory, dynamic capabilities theory and the contingency theory. The research design adopted was the cross-sectional survey research and positivist approach. The population of respondents were the employees of selected commercial banks in the country who were sampled using Taro Yamane formula to obtain the size of 370 respondents, the sampling technique was proportionate stratified and simple random sampling technique. The data for the primary data were taken by using structured questionnaires. Descriptive data, Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient and Partial Correlation Coefficient were used to analyse the data at 0.05 level of significance. There was a positive and significant relationship between operational efficiency and price innovation (r = 0.216, p< 0.01), product innovation (r = 0.484, p< 0.01), promotion innovation (r = 0.396, p< 0.01) and distribution innovation (r = 0.451, p< 0.01). The study also found that strategic marketing innovations were positively and significantly correlated to the organization performance and the positive relationship between strategic marketing innovations and the organization performance was mediated by the environmental dynamism. Results showed that the strategic marketing innovations play an important role to improve the operation's efficiency concerning with environment. The study recommended that commercial banks need to reinforce the marketing strategy based on innovation and closely watch environmental changes. The study yielded empirical findings on the moderating effect of environmental dynamism in the strategic marketing innovation – organizational performance relationship in the banking sector of the Nigerian economy which added to knowledge.