Larsen Barasa
Background: Modern freight forwarders are increasingly reliant on digital data skills to preserve their competitive advantage. However, the specific ways in which these talents lead to decision-relevant outcomes i.e. competitiveness and customer satisfaction remain largely unexplored. This gap in the research is especially noticeable in the logistics industries of emerging nations like Indonesia.Objectives: The aim of this study is to examine the influence of market orientation and service digitalization on the general competitiveness of freight forwarders. Moreover, the paper studies the downstream impacts of this competition on consumer satisfaction. The empirical research is situated within a mid-sized freight forwarding company in Indonesia. Methods: The present study was conducted with a quantitative and cross-sectional design to examine the expressed associations. For full coverage, the study used the saturated sampling method, covering a total of 154 customer firms. Systematic primary data gathering was performed via standardized Likert-scale questionnaires. In the next step of analysis, Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed with a strict bootstrapping technique of 5000 resamples to ensure the statistical significance. Results: The structural model found that market orientation is a major predictor of competitiveness (β=0.656, p<0.001). In addition, the firm’s competitive position is considerably affected by service digitalization (β=0.244, p<0.001). The two independent factors explain a significant percentage of the variance of competitiveness (R 2 =0.744). Moreover, service digitalization had a very large direct effect on customer happiness (β=0.380, p=0.001) and was the greatest predictive path to satisfaction in the whole model. Conversely, the direct impacts of market orientation and competitiveness on satisfaction and their proposed mediation paths failed to reach statistical significance after a rigorous bootstrap uncertainty assessment. The final cause of this reduction of significance was found to be high collinearity across the three main predictors (VIFs ranging from 2.9 to 4.4).Therefore, the results suggest that market orientation and service digitization are simultaneous and independent strategic levers and not sequential in a pipeline. Clearly, market orientation is the key mechanism driving the competitive posture of the business. Meanwhile, the digitalization of service directly effects customer happiness, without the need for competition as a mediating variable in between. The research results have important practical consequences for logistics sector. Specifically they provide freight forwarders with a very specific framework for strategic resource allocation. Digitalization and market orientation are no longer generic good projects but rather management can invest in them with specific organizational goals.