ایجاد ارزش مشتری برتر برای شرکت های B2B از طریق قابلیت های شرکت تامین کننده

In a dynamic global business-to-business (B2B) environment, innovation and marketing appear crucial to providing supplier firms' positional advantage through the ability to create value for customers. Our examination is grounded in seeking to address the research question: To what extent is the creation of superior performance, relationship, and co-creation value driven by market orientation, product innovation and marketing capabilities in B2B firms? The results of a survey of 155 large B2B firms show product innovation capability and marketing capability partially mediates the relationship between a firms' market orientation and its ability to create value (performance and co-creation), except for the role of marketing capability which we found acted as a full mediator of the relationship between market orientation and relationship value.

The evolution in marketing thought increasingly suggests that simply being market oriented is not enough to create value and gain marketplace advantages; firms must attempt to deliver two types of value: 1) build relationships with business customers; and 2) collaborate with them (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000) and to do this they need value creating capabilities. Encouraging these value creating activities may represent the next frontier in advantage seeking behaviors (Bendapudi and Leone, 2003 and O'Cass and Ngo, 2011), especially in the B2B environment. Such outcomes may represent specific types of value customers are looking for and can help the firm understand their customers, and better identify their needs (Lusch and Vargo, 2006 and Payne et al., 2008). However, while focusing on these two increasingly important value creating activities we cannot neglect the importance of delivering to customers' superior performance value in the core product. Importantly, the path to achieving marketplace advantages is through developing and commercializing value offerings (Lindgreen & Wynstra, 2005) which are delivered via specific capabilities such as product innovation and marketing. Given the existing theoretical foundations and practical issues confronting B2B firms (Lindgreen & Wynstra, 2005), an area that warrants attention is the level of emphasis firms place on marketing and product innovation in their effort to create superior customer value for their business customers. Firms may attempt to enhance customer value and competitive advantage through superiority in marketing and/or product innovation, but a lack of understanding and control over these functions has the potential to create inferior capabilities in these areas which may weaken the ability to create superior value over rivals.

The key objective of this study was to examine the roles of B2B firms' product innovation and marketing capabilities in contributing to the achievement of superior value creation in relation to performance, relationship and co-creation value. Our theory embedded within the positional advantage theory articulated that while in a B2B context MO is important it does not directly influence value creation. Specifically, we provide empirical mediational evidence that MO works partially through B2B firms' product innovation and marketing capabilities in facilitating the creation of superior value, especially performance value, and co-creation value. Whereas we show that product innovation capability partially mediates the MO-relationship value created by B2B firms, marketing capability fully mediates this relationship. Our findings provide a critical perspective about how B2B firms create value for their customers by deploying specific capabilities and how MO facilitates this deployment process.