13,581 research outputs found
Codes of Conduct and Marketing Strategies in Kenyaâs Horticultural Sector
The global demand for product quality and safety in Western European markets has motivated rapid growth of production and marketing codes of conduct between business partners. However, though the Kenya Horticultural Crops Development Authorityâs code of conduct on contractual guidelines has promoted business to farm business (B2B) relationships between exporters and smallholders, the relationships have received little empirical analysis. This paper uses case analysis based on strategic marketing framework to examine the B2Bâs purpose, target and competitive, growth, promotion, distribution, and pricing strategies. The analysis reveals that the B2B strategies are based on supply chain governance constructs: written and verbal contracts. The purpose of the contracts is to manage procurement of high quality and safe produce which in itself is contingent on the European Union market served. On targets, written contracts seem efficient with organized producers and verbal contracts with independent producers. As competitive edges, written contracts are orientated toward differentiation strategy and verbal contracts, low-cost strategy. Growth in written contracts is through market penetration and diversification in verbal contracts. However, sharp differences exist on distributional, promotional and pricing strategies. Keywords: code of conduct, contracts, marketing strategies, horticulture, Keny
A Conceptual Framework for B2B Electronic Contracting
Electronic contracting aims at improving existing business relationship paradigms and at enabling new forms of contractual relationships. To successfully realize these objectives, an integral understanding of the contracting field must be established. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for business-to-business contracting support. The framework provides a complete view over the contracting field. It allows positioning research efforts in the domain, analysing them, placing their goals into perspective, and overseeing future research topics and issues. It is the basis for drawing conclusions about basic requirements to contracting systems
Measuring customer satisfaction and understanding customer effort in a B2B context
Our members asked us to investigate a number of aspects of Customer Satisfaction
measurement in a Business-to-Business (B2B) context. Specific questions were:- What are the different metrics of customer satisfaction that are measured in a BTB
relationship? Which are used the most? Which are the most effective? Do they vary by
type of company? Are there new ways to measure customer satisfaction that more closely reflects their
customer experience? What does customer effort mean in a B2B relationship? How do we identify where we
are not easy to do business with? What do we have to do differently?
Our approach to the subject was to review existing literature and previous research and then to
conduct an exploratory qualitative review into the subject by conducting interviews with a range
of B2B companies and a sample of their customers. The purpose behind the interviews was to try
to answer the above questions and to identify if there were opportunities for more in-depth
research in the future.
The project demonstrates that the B2B companies compile and use a customer satisfaction
rating for their business-to-business relationships but that there is little commonality between
companies in both the full range of questions asked and the scales used for the individual
questions. All of the companies use a mixture of global and dimensional measures (see literature
review in section 2).
There is some scope for manipulation of the customer satisfaction process in most companies so
the results have to be treated with a degree of caution. However, the companies believe that
they are getting good positive and negative feedback from the process so they see significant
value from it.
Where the customer satisfaction rating falls below an acceptable level, which differs by
company, responses are shared with the customer as part of the regular relationship meeting
and a monitored action plan is the normal result. In addition, in most cases, common issues are
identified at company level and considered for improvement programs.
The questions about customer effort showed that companies in general consider themselves
more difficult to do business with than their customers do. Analysis of both company and
customer views of what was âeasyâ and what was âdifficultâ about the relationship identified a
number of interactions that could potentially be the subject of process improvement initiatives.
It appears from this research that the inclusion of customer effort questions would benefit the
customer satisfaction process for B2B companies and a number of best practise approaches
were identified from this and previous research
Contextualized B2B Registries
Abstract. Service discovery is a fundamental concept underpinning the move towards dynamic service-oriented business partnerships. The business process for integrating service discovery and underlying registry technologies into business relationships, procurement and project management functions has not been examined and hence existing Web Service registries lack capabilities required by business today. In this paper we present a novel contextualized B2B registry that supports dynamic registration and discovery of resources within management contexts to ensure that the search space is constrained to the scope of authorized and legitimate resources only. We describe how the registry has been deployed in three case studies from important economic sectors (aerospace, automotive, pharmaceutical) showing how contextualized discovery can support distributed product development processes
- âŠ