Partnering with Customers

Abstract

Partnering with customers is a powerful new business approach, but an implementation framework is required. Discusses how six corporations collaborated in an exercise to develop partnership guidelines. Illustrates the framework in fields ranging from high tech to consumer products.

“Vertical coopetition”: The key account perspective

“…On the one hand, we have the search for cooperation to gain mutual benefits (Dunn & Thomas, 1994), on the other, an emphasis on short-term transactions with price-related benefits designed to attract new customers (price competitive transactions). There has as yet been little academic interest in the "grey area" in which transactional and relational features are supposed to become intertwined in the middle of the continuum, or how "pie expansion" and "pie sharing" can overlap and merge.…”

“…Consequently, many researchers have shown that a relational and cooperative orientation is key, in customer-seller relationships, to improving value creation and the customer's competitive advantage (Anderson & Narus, 1991;Cardozo, Shipp, & Roering, 1992;Day, 2000;Dunn & Thomas, 1994;Dyer & Singh, 1998;Ford, 2001;Grönroos, 1997;Jap, 1999;Morgan & Hunt, 1994) and is increasingly the norm in buyer-seller relationships (Walter, Müller, Helfert, & Ritter, 2003). For these academics, value creation is optimised via cooperative relationships (Ulaga & Eggert, 2006), even if they recognise that "customer firms perceive value creation as positive only if they appropriate a larger slice of the bigger value pie" (Wagner, Eggert, & Lindemann, 2010:1).…”

Solutions offerings: a critical review and reconceptualisation

“…Vertical solutions thus require a more customer-centred organization than do horizontal solutions. Dunn and Thomas (1994) developed a hierarchy of buyer-seller relationships, ranging from transactional selling to partnership solutions, through product solutions and business solutions. In their view, a product solution consisted of a product augmented by applications and services, a business solution combined multiple product solutions to address a business problem, and a partnership solution linked multiple business solutions across the corporation.…”

Full service contracts in the printing industry: An empirical investigation of service definition

“…Another relevant characteristic concerns the kind of interactions occurring between the provider and the customer along the process of solution design, development, implementation and delivery. In particular, transactional approaches are more common in case of standard solutions, while more enduring relationships with customers are established in case of higher levels of customization [27]. A further distinction concerns the solution scope.…”