The role of marketing managers' personal skills in organizational innovation and marketing innovation strategies

While it is very difficult to be lasting in the business world, it is even more difficult to be one of the leading ones and sustain it. One of the underlying factors of the success of powerful companies is organizational innovation. Innovative organizations can gain competitive advantage in the business world by supporting and implementing new ideas or adopting and adapting the innovations. In this study, it is aimed to find out whether the marketing managers' problem-solving skills, creativities, and innovation skills, by means of organizational innovation, are effective or not on the innovation strategies, achieved by the marketing function, which has substantial responsibilities for organizations to gain competitive advantage. The data, obtained between 2017-2019, from 184 marketing managers participating from 67 of 124 food and beverage companies in the ISO500 list, were analyzed by using the SMARTPLS 3.0 program. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that organizational innovativeness had a significant positive effect on marketing innovation strategies. It was determined that individual innovativeness had a significant positive effect on the organizational innovativeness and that effect furthermore, had influenced the marketing innovation strategies positively. However, it was observed that the problem solving and creativity skills did not have a direct significant effect on organizational innovativeness. Based upon the absence of this effect, problem solving and creativity skills could not be associated with marketing innovation strategies, through organizational innovation. However, in the current research, it was concluded that problem-solving skill affected organizational innovativeness over creativity skill, and creativity skills affected organizational innovativeness over individual innovativeness skills, and marketing innovation strategies through it. In the study, it is additionally tried to determine the general profile structures of marketing managers, their levels of problem solving, creativity, innovation skills, the leading companies' perceptions of innovation, and marketing innovation strategies they applied. In the light of the obtained results, some suggestions were made for the practitioners and researchers.