مدلسازی ادراک ارزش مشتری در بازارهای کسب و کار میان فرهنگی

Even as customer value research in business-to-business markets burgeons, scholars still circumscribe its progress to studies performed in domestic, Western markets and call attention to the ongoing lack of consensus for how to model customer value. To advance the validity and usefulness of this emerging core construct in marketing, this study investigates the measurement equivalence and modeling of customer value perceptions with business managers across five culturally-diverse countries. Analyses draw clarity to the divergent modeling of customer value in the literature by exploring alternative measures and model specifications within structural equations modeling (SEM) and partial least squares (PLS). Comparisons of eight models reveal several valid and invalid conceptualizations reported previously in the literature and generate guidance for managers and scholars modeling customer value in various research contexts.

Scholars propose that firms who gain deeper insights into the sources of value creation can craft superior value propositions in a competitive global marketplace (Anderson and Narus, 2008, Blocker and Flint, 2007a, Blocker and Flint, 2007b and La et al., 2008). Business marketers agree and cite the need to better understand the drivers of customers' value as a top priority (Oliva, 2005). Yet, as firms heed the call to conduct more customer value research (Anderson et al., 2006), they still face a key unanswered question. How applicable are existing measures and models of customer value—which have been developed primarily in the United States—for culturally-diverse markets such as India? The notion of customer value rests at the heart of marketing. Yet, as firms aggressively pursue global opportunities using market research, what constitutes “superior value” across the globe should not be assumed as universal. Rather, like other key marketing constructs, it requires rigorous cross-cultural testing (Steenkamp, 2005). Without reliable and invariant measures, firms who simply translate their market surveys into other languages may be drawing the wrong conclusions about customers' needs (Ueltschy et al., 2004) and cascading these misinterpretations down into poorly defined segmentation and customer relationship strategies. As it stands, customer value research is a nascent area (Smith and Colgate, 2007) and has yet to advance rigorous insights into these questions. In response, this study addresses two significant gaps in the measurement and modeling of customer value in global business markets.

Can customer value measurement be standardized across cross-cultural business-to-business contexts? Results from the global context studied here indicate that the provisional answer to this question appears to be yes. Measurement equivalence tests reveal that the notion of customer value, as an overall perceived trade-off between benefits and sacrifices in relationships, holds up quite well as a culturally-transferrable construct. Furthermore, in all five countries, analyses show evidence for discriminant validity and validate the ability for customer value to explain significant variation in relationship satisfaction. This result helps establish the cross-cultural generalizability of the customer value construct in business-to-business contexts. Results also show that much more work is needed to understand the most salient value drivers in a given context. Although measures were found conceptually equivalent and overall value perceptions consistently explain satisfaction, three to five value drivers demonstrated significant paths to overall customer value perceptions. The ability to measure a cross-culturally valid customer value construct can aid firms in their efforts to conduct customer value analysis (Desarbo et al., 2001). The area of business customer metrics could apparently use greater clarity and rigor. Business marketers continue trying a host of new metrics in hopes of unlocking fresh insights (Keiningham et al., 2007). Executives readily adopt new measures such as the Customer Affinity Index (Maddox, 2008) or the Net Promoter that promise to advance market intelligence (Reichheld, 2006). Yet, several new measures have been found wanting, and few have been subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny (Keiningham et al., 2007).