ساخت تواناییها و ظرفیتها برای ایجاد ارزش مشتری جدید : مطالعه اکتشافی

Recent marketing literature suggests companies to become market driving (proactive business logic, changing the rules of the market) instead of market driven (reactive business logic, customer-led). This transformation implies that companies are able to boost their capacity to create new customer value. Based on survey data of business-to-business markets, we advance a tentative model that links competence development to new customer value creation. Although exploratory in its nature, our study exhibits that companies should build three types of competences: marketing practices for external knowledge absorption, general organizational competences and supply chain/network competences. Using cluster analysis, we are able to further link these competences to the capacity of new value creation. Four clusters are detected with different degrees of expertise in new value creation and each displaying their own profile of competences. Becoming market driving requires an integrated and balanced view on marketing practices.

This article explores the competences suppliers need to develop in order to continuously being able to create new customer value. Extant literature pinpoints the urgency of building marketing capabilities to become market oriented and to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Day, 1994, Day, 2002 and Day, 2003 stressed the importance of market sensing and customer linking capabilities. Lacking these capabilities, firms are more likely to get out of touch with their markets, and might be surprised by shifts in customer requirements and/or lose their ability to react or innovate. These firms will consequently lose their capacity to anticipate market changes. Moreover, flawed assumptions, misinformation and internal disagreements might slow down their reactions. On the contrary, market-driven firms are believed to have superior processes for learning about markets consisting of sensing and sense-making activities. Such firms have also developed systems to effectively capture and retain the collected market information. More broadly, the market orientation literature looks at how ‘market driven’ companies can learn about market developments, share this information within the organization and adapt the offering to the market (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990). However, companies facing professional customers and an intensified competitive arena must even go one step further, from market driven to ‘market driving’ ( Jaworski et al., 2000 and Tuominen et al., 2004). In fact, recent pleas for value innovation in business markets (Matthyssens, Vandenbempt, & Berghman, in press forthcoming) and other contributions stress the danger of dominant logics and persistence. Especially in the context of high-velocity markets ( Bogner and Barr, 2000 and Sinkula, 2002), scholars suggest that a market driving approach might be more apt to generate growth and build sustainable competitive advantage.

In today's competitive business markets, suppliers are continuously challenged to anticipate rather than follow changes in customer value. Customers often seek innovative suppliers that are offering new value concepts or total solution packages. Global competition undermines differentiation in ever shorter time. This study consequently focused on the mix of competences suppliers should develop in order to be able to meet these customer and market expectations. It shows the importance of building the right combination of competences for absorptive capacity (defined as marketing practices for external knowledge recognition, assimilation and transformation), organizational and network competences. Real market driving companies seem to be able to reach high excellence in all three categories of competences. The study indicates that all three activities within external knowledge absorption are equally important in new value creation. First, weak signals and ‘out of the box’ observations must be captured (so-called recognition). A real value creator senses market trends (recognition) at different levels in its supply chain and in adjacent chains. This study shares with Day (1994) the importance of market sensing as a starting point of value creation, thereby stressing the importance of wide screening horizons (outside the existing dyadic relations). Traditional market sensing capability is not enough, though. This feeds the company with information, but the recognized information must also be assimilated and transformed. The latter processes are in line with Sinkula's (2002) unlearning concept and Day, 2002 and Day, 1994 assertion that marketing capabilities and organizational processes are intertwined (e.g., diffusion of learning, interpretation of knowledge). This study extends this stream of literature as it shows that real strategic learning (Thomas, Watts Sussman, & Herderson, 2001) must take place in order to generate market driving value creation. The supplier must develop marketing practices to simultaneously integrate the new information with the present knowledge base, stimulate sense making (Day, 2002) and be willing to transform its processes.