Relationships in the purchasing of business to business professional services: The role of personal relationships

There has been a shift from transactional to relational exchange and relationship marketing both in the business to business and professional services contexts. This paper seeks to explore the manner in which personal relationships affect the process and outcomes of purchasing of professional business services. Specifically, it focuses on the role of the professional service providers as boundary spanners in the formation of personal relationships. These personal relationships constitute the underlying basis of long-term relationships between the purchasing and provider organizations in such complex service settings. The findings of this study demonstrate that the manner in which the boundary spanners cultivate relationships support the concept of relationship specific tasks. It extends this conception by use of the data to outline the chronological process over time Understanding the roles, function, and ultimately importance, of these relationships facilitates the identification and development of appropriate strategies to manage these relationships.     

Marketing of competence: Exploring the resource-based content of value-for-customers through a case study analysis

In this article, we propose a competence-based view of value-for-customer in business markets. While literature in both strategy and marketing has provided many insights to understand the competence-based roots of value creation, the interface between the two areas is still largely unexplored. Moreover, while the notions of competence exchange and value creation feature strongly in the relational perspective, they occur only once relationships have been established. This begs the question whether competencies could be developed outside established relationships, and then marketed to guide customers' buying behavior. Basing on three case studies from the yarn manufacturing, IT systems, and automotive components industries, we identify key features of competence-based marketing: the alignment of supplier's competencies with the customer's business processes, the experiential communication of supplier's competencies, and the delivery of competencies to the buyer's business processes. Within the strategies for creating value-for-customers, these findings contribute to the understanding of the use of competencies to induce purchases.     

Customer segments as moving targets: Integrating customer value dynamism into segment instability logic

Segmentation is a mature concept in marketing strategy that continues to receive significant attention from managers and scholars alike. The key goal in segmentation is identifying and reaching profitable segments with products and services that meet the common needs of these customers. However, a fundamental issue needing rigorous attention is that customers' needs are dynamic and can induce segment instability. The purpose of this paper is to draw focus to segment instability in business-to-business markets by conceptually exploring its theoretical underpinnings and integrating related theory on customer value change to propose an agenda for future research.     

Concerning trust and information

Communication and the associated information exchanges are key drivers of the development of relationships and of the trust embedded within them. This paper considers the development of business relationships in terms of the continuing co-evolution of trust and information exchange and the issues associated with researching these processes. The interconnections of trust and information exchange are examined in a survey of business relationships involving information exchange (n = 355). Analysis of variance shows few, if any, of the aspects of the standard conceptualizations of information exchange are associated with increased levels of trust. It is information exchange norms that have the greatest (positive) association with the level of trust. These norms emerge as part of the long term co-production of the relationship itself. This has important managerial implications. We conclude there are few managerial actions involving managing communication that can “manufacture” trust and improve or develop relationships in the short term. The paper concludes with a discussion of alternative ways of envisaging communication and relationship management and the nature and future of research into the evolution of business relationships.     

Collaborative buyer-supplier relationships and downstream information in marketing channels

Research on buyer-supplier relationships has emphasized the importance of collaboration and business networks. We aim to study the effects of downstream information on the collaborative buyer-supplier relationship. Downstream information refers to the information a firm obtains from marketing channels, be they wholesalers, distributors or retailers. The approach allows firms to concentrate their efforts on the most relevant sources of information and not on the whole network. Survey data was gathered from the Dutch potted plant and flower industry to test this hypothesis. Our findings demonstrate that collaborative relationships are contingent on downstream information from both the buying perspective (wholesalers) and from the supplying perspective (producers).     

What's next in key account management research? Building the bridge between the academic literature and the practitioners' priorities

This research contrasts the academic literature on key account management (KAM) with the topics in this subject that are most critical to practitioners. Sixty four academic articles published in 17 journals, and ninety practitioners' articles appearing in the Velocity Magazine — published by the Strategic Account Management Association — were content analyzed and classified under ten ‘topic’ categories. Similarities and differences in the results for academics and practitioners are discussed. In addition, two specific topics were identified as being extremely important to managers but still under-researched by academics: the role of senior management in KAM, and the importance of internal alignment in determining KAM success.     

Integrating expected coverage and local reliability for emergency medical services location problems

Daskin's MEXCLP model [Daskin M. A maximum expected covering location model: formulation, properties, and heuristic solution. Transportation Science 1983;17:48-70] was one of the first efforts to capture the stochastic nature of emergency medical services (EMS) location problems within a mixed-integer formulation. With their subsequent introduction of MALP, ReVelle and Hogan [The maximum availability location problem. Transportation Science 1989;23:192-200] offered two key advances, local vehicle busyness estimates and the α-reliability objective. While these constructs have influenced many subsequent EMS location models, they have been subjected to relatively little empirical analysis. To address this, we introduce the LR-MEXCLP, a hybrid model combining the local busyness estimates of MALP with the maximum coverage objective of MEXCLP. We then solve a series of problems with all three models and employ simulation to estimate aggregate service levels. We find that LR-MEXCLP leads to modest but consistent service gains over both MALP and MEXCLP. These results support the merits of local busyness estimates, but they also suggest that the α-reliability objective may be inappropriate when seeking to maximize aggregate system response capabilities. More generally, our research underscores the utility of (a) linking modeling assumptions and goals with real-world application contexts, and (b) employing simulation or other techniques to validate theoretical results.     

The UK technology foresight programme: An assessment of expert estimates

Since the early 1990s, ‘Technology Foresight’ exercises with special emphasis on the use of Delphi surveys have played an important role in science and technology (S + T) policy across Europe in an effort to focus resource allocation. Yet, none of the estimates made in the European Delphi surveys have been formally assessed in retrospect, while this process has been incorporated into the Japanese surveys since 1996. Taking the UK Technology Foresight Programme, this research sets out to assess the estimates of three of the fifteen panel Delphi surveys. Whilst on average 2/3 of Delphi statements were predicted to be realised by 2004, it will be shown that only a fraction of these statements had been realised by 2006. Based on the evidence collected from the published panel reports, the ‘Hindsight on Foresight’ survey conducted by OST in 1995 and interviews with panel members, it will be argued that the overwhelming majority of estimates were overly optimistic. While optimism and strategic gaming of experts is the most convincing explanation for these results, process factors were also explored, including the quality of expert panels used, the Delphi statements and the respondents of the Delphi questionnaire. It is argued that at least the issue of short-range optimism and strategic gaming of experts should be addressed in future Delphi exercises, as decision makers relying on expert advice cannot deal with this issue alone.     

How does a cluster relocate across the border? The case of information technology cluster in the Taiwan-Suzhou region

Since the end of the Cold War, cross-border regions have proliferated at the borders of formal socialist countries, especially in China. Existing accounts of these emergences treat them either at the macro-level, focusing on political initiatives, or at the micro-level, with emphasis on social and economic relations. This paper uses the Taiwan-Suzhou cross-border region as a case study for suggesting a meso-level approach, arguing that as a result of continuous interactions between individual Taiwanese information technology firms and opportunity structures generated by the selective opening of the Chinese border, the formation of cross-border high-tech regions is shaped and determined at the level of the industrial system. The industrial system acts as a platform for coordination and cooperation between local elites and foreign investors and among individual firms within this system. The formation of the cross-border high-tech region thus involves the relocation and institutional re-embedding of industrial systems across the border, which has been accompanied by the systemic building of Taiwanese firms on the one hand, and the institutional innovation of Chinese local states on the other.     

Technology transfer in the IT industry: A Korean perspective

Recently Korean Government announced ambitious IT strategy to establish Korea as one of leaders in world IT market. To implement this strategy, technology transfer from research lab to market should be successfully performed. This study is to identify factors influencing technology transfer and to examine contribution of these factors on success of technology transfer in Korean IT industry. Survey results show that technology project leaders evaluated “Concreteness of Technology” as the most influential factor for technology transfer, followed by “Communication Channels,” “Collaboration among Participants,” “Management Support,” “Government Support,” and “Incentives for Transfer.” Out of 135 technology transfer projects, respondents rated 33 projects as sustaining (28.44%), 38 as promoting (28.15%), 26 as demonstrating (19.26%), 27 in incubating (20.00%), and the remaining 7 in imaging stage (8.15%). This statistics means that 28.15% of technology transfer projects did not reach production stage. Regression analysis identifies that “Communication Channels,” “Management Support,” “Concreteness of Technology” “Sense of Common Purpose,” and “Awareness of Technology Transfer” were statistically significant in explaining success of technology transfer.