صلاحیت های بازاریابی و منابع ارزش مشتری در بازارهای کسب و کار

This introduction to the special issue discusses the notion of marketing competencies in buyer–supplier relationships, and the role these competencies play in creating value for the customer. Existing work on the role of competencies in industrial marketing has two main foci. The first, established approach deals with competencies as inputs to organizational processes, and seeks to establish in how far marketing competencies such as customer relationship management, channel design, etc. lead to superior financial returns. The second, emerging, approach focuses on the marketing of competencies as a source for customer value. This article uses supply and demand side perspectives to look at these two approaches and suggests a typolology involving four distinct value-creation strategies. Recent literature is discussed and implications for advancing the application of resource-based thinking to industrial marketing are provided.

The idea for this special issue comes from practice. It grew out of the experience of Bocconi University's Research Center on Markets and Industries (Cermes) during projects involving international trade fairs and other “live” communication events. Doing contact research with companies, we increasingly saw a phenomenon which we somehow could not account for using established theoretical frameworks. In marketing communication for business markets, it had become increasingly common to focus communicative content on the upstream resources and skills that suppliers offered to customers, rather than on the products to be sold. For example, instead of focussing on current products, exhibitors at capital goods trade fairs tended to present on the stands technical staff from the R&D department and prototypes built to customer specifications. Trade fairs exhibiting yarn presented fashion shows and the clothing collections for the coming seasons (future products of their customers), rather than the balls of cotton or wool to be sold. At fairs specializing in medical instruments, the technicians of supplying firms discussed developments in pathologies and research techniques, and not the particular characteristics of the instruments themselves. Thus, what we saw in practice was that, instead of focussing on products, the exhibitors presented the competencies underlying these products, competencies that could be instrumental also in the future to add value to the customers' processes, and competencies that would dovetail neatly with the customer's specific competence gaps.

The number and nature of the articles in the four boxes of Fig. 2 points to areas where further work is needed. The left-hand side of the matrix is reasonably well-established, with a number of empirical papers (all those in Box 1, and one in Box 2). Clearly, further conceptual work is needed in the entire right-hand side of the matrix. Here, the majority of papers are research notes, which suggests further work to refine the conceptual apparatus. To begin with, the demand side of competencies has received some attention both conceptually and empirically (Möller and Törröen, 2003 and Walter et al., 2001). This work is commendable since a firm's ability to exploit external knowledge can be considered as a critical component of innovative performance. As a prime source of the external knowledge is recognized to reside in supply chain, supplier selection has become a strategic activity, aimed at evaluating the supplier potential to value creation. The literature has recently focused on this potential, that has been synthesized in three main functions: efficiency, effectiveness and networking. “Efficiency” potential refers to the supplier ability in reducing production and transactional costs and in improving offering quality. “Effectiveness” is related to the supplier ability to contribute to incremental innovations as new products and solutions that can extend the customer's market. The “networking function” synthesizes the opportunity for the customer to get access to network actors of the supplier and then to the opportunity for radical innovations. This potential resides in supplier resources and competences: so the customers should select the suppliers by assessing the supplier's resources and competencies underpinning the requested functions. Work in this area is beginning to move from a conceptual to an empirical and practical focus (e.g., Feeney et al., 2005), with the main question being “given that suppliers' competencies represent a proxy for future value creation potential, how can we as buyers be sure to pick the right supplier?”.