The Mediating Effect of Marketing Agility on Business Model Innovation and Management Performance

Abstract

Business model innovation changes how a firm creates and captures value, but redesign alone does not explain how managers convert new arrangements into sustained performance. This conceptual research paper develops a conditional mediation framework in which marketing agility connects an implemented business model change with subsequent business-unit outcomes. Drawing on business model research, dynamic capabilities, organizational learning, and marketing scholarship, the paper distinguishes agility that precedes innovation from agility that develops during its implementation. The proposed mechanism operates when a redesigned business model improves access to customer information and the ability to revise market-facing decisions. Marketing agility then supports repeated interpretation, experimentation, and resource adjustment, potentially improving customer retention, implementation effectiveness, and profitability. These benefits depend on the content of the innovation, the interpretability of market feedback, and the costs of repeated adaptation. Six propositions explain why the indirect relationship may differ across business model components and why short-term financial effects can diverge from longer-term outcomes. A prospective research design specifies temporal separation, distinct measures, alternative causal directions, and the assumptions required for mediation analysis. The contribution is a theoretically derived explanation of when marketing agility can transmit the consequences of business model innovation, rather than an empirical estimate of an established effect. For managers, the framework shifts attention from adopting agile routines in isolation to aligning information access, decision authority, and performance evaluation with the redesigned business model.