A Case Study Examination into How Suppliers Create and Deliver Customer-Perceived Value through a Long-Term Industrial Buyer-Supplier Relationship

Abstract

Increasingly, organisations are focusing on creating and delivering customer value to grow profits, earn customer lifetime loyalty, and develop more responsive solutions to business needs. Concurrently, organisations are entering into long-term buyer-supplier relationships. Marketing research supports the importance of adopting customer value strategies, linking them to customer learning, product and service delivery and, more recently, relational contexts. Yet, little is known about how customer-perceived value is created and delivered through (or in) a long-term relationship – the tendency is to focus on transactional exchanges and describe the (resulting) relationship as a source of value. This thesis presents a single case study, examining how customer value is created and delivered through a long-term industrial buyer-supplier relationship. Adopting a qualitative research approach, we examine the buyer and supplier perspectives. Through an analysis of multiple data sources, we demonstrate suppliers must learn continuously about customers’ needs. Such learning should then be reinforced further through learning how to respond to those needs. As a consequence, suppliers may have to develop their own competencies, in addition to customers’ competencies. Furthermore, we find sound business processes are required to deliver competencies, along with a combination of goods and services. These findings are presented as four strategy elements – ongoing value learning, process development, employee competency development, and product and service delivery – along with a model to help visualise the connection between them, and thus demonstrate how, through a long-term relationship, buyer value may be consciously and systematically created and delivered over time. The implications of our findings are important to the practice and theory of marketing and relationship value in particular. They help to provide some practical guidance to understand the elements required to create customer value strategies through industrial relationships. Further, our findings confirm the importance of considering a multiple stakeholder perspective, and the need for future research to focus on understanding the different interactional complexities that occur between buyers and suppliers who are highly interdependent and create value with joint skills and knowledge.