AL JABRI, MADHAD ALI SAID2025-01-282025-01-282024-1021002103https://bspace.buid.ac.ae/handle/1234/2766Previous research has highlighted the importance of firms building up their resources continuously to gain competitive advantage and remain viable in the fast changing and dynamic market. This is achieved by resources renewal enabling unique innovative products offerings and operational excellence resulting from all kind of strategic capabilities. However, firms’ ability to maximise opportunities realisation and balance their exploration and exploitations varies due to various contextual and organisational challenges such as digital maturity and strategic orientations which plays a crucial role in the evolving digital ecosystem. To improve our understanding on how firms can achieve sustainable competitive advantage and what strategies (outside-in or inside-out) need to be followed while uncovering whether strategy should be static, dynamic, adaptive or ambidextrous, this empirical research study examines how adaptive marketing capability influence firm's long-term survival and sustainability in the marketplace. This investigation is done considering the joint effect of market ambidexterity mediation and the moderation of both strategic orientations and digital transformation. This assessment is made using a deductive, quantitative method as the researcher philosophy is more positivism where a survey is a technique adopted and a Likert questionnaire is designed to collect data from ICT, IT and Telecom digital services enterprises in the UAE context where digital transformation is given a focus during and post the COVID-19 Pandemic and EXPO2020 event. Previous published literature was used to adopt validated scale where 224 responses were tested using IBM-SPSS 26.0, Smart PLS 4.0, and IBM- Amos 26.0. Data were analysed using variance based structural equation modelling (SEM) due to the model complexity and sample size as well as the non-uniform distribution of the sample data. The results suggest that adaptive marketing capability is statistically positively related to sustainable competitive advantage through market ambidexterity and the joint effect of digital transformation and strategic orientation is significant as mediation-moderation on this relationship. However, the impact of adaptive marketing capability found in-significant as a direct relationship and on a similar manner while digital transformation is moderating this direct relationship. Also it was found that firms with strategic orientations are more likely to leverage the ambidexterity capability leading to sustainable competitive advantage. This study contributes to literature on providing more insights on how marketing and strategic management interact to provide long-term competitive advantages in extremely volatile digital environment with global open ecosystem. It also enlightens the market ambidexterity body of knowledge during digital transformation and strategic orientations cultural shift programs. It also provides better understanding on the intersect between Resource Advantage theory, dynamic capability theory, organisational ambidexterity and adaptive marketing capability views. In addition, it proposes a converged (strategic and marketing management convergence in digital era) theoretical framework for future research. It offers executives practical insights on how to utilize the digital transformation and ambidexterity programs for building strategic ambidextrous capabilities that balancing the tensions between the exploration and exploitation activities and developing strategic orientations that is risk taking and with a culture of positive engagement to enable higher organisational success. Keywords: Adaptive Marketing Capability, Sustainable Competitive Advantage, Market Ambidexterity, Strategic Orientations, Digital Transformation, Dynamic Capability Theory, R-A Theoryenadaptive marketing capability, sustainable competitive advantage, market ambidexterity, strategic orientations, digital transformation, dynamic capability theory, R-A theoryThesisDr Lahrech, Abdelmounaim