Marketing capability and new venture survival: The role of marketing myopia

Ventures face a duality in developing marketing capabilities?ventures may lack the resources and have a limited understanding of the market to develop marketing capabilities, and yet, capabilities can be a key to venture survival. We ask whether marketing capability helps ventures improve their survival odds and whether myopic marketing investments induce necessary adaptiveness to strengthen the effect of marketing capability on venture survival. Resource-constrained ventures may particularly benefit from myopic marketing investments that help re-evaluate and adapt marketing capability. Using a sample of 47,875 ventures in Portugal and a Cox proportional-hazards model, we obtain several results. First, we find that ventures realize a positive survival benefit from marketing capability. Second, myopic marketing investments have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between marketing capability and venture survival odds. Lastly, although the effect sizes of marketing capability and the interaction between marketing myopia and marketing capability are not large, they are robust to a variety of model specifications and robustness checks.