Value dimensions and relationship postures in dyadic 'key relationship programmes'

Business-to-business marketing is often concerned with the way in which companies manage strategically important relationships with their counterparts: their Key Relationship Programmes (KRPs). These relationships can be managed through the implementation of specific managerial and organisational structures, commonly implemented via Key Account Programmes (on the supplier side) or Key Supplier Programmes (on the customer side). Underlying this managerial process is an implicit assumption that these important relationships bring some form of additional value to one or both parties involved. However, a dyadic view of how this value is created and shared between the parties remains an under-researched area. In this conceptual paper, we use the multi-faceted value construct introduced in Pardo et al. (2006) and posit that the buyer's or seller's value strategies can be best understood as being internally, exchange, or relationship based. This in turn allows us to analyse the value gained as being the outcome of one of nine generic key relationship postures within any dyadic KRP. We focus on an analysis of so-called "managed" relationship postures and identify a number of dyadic activities and competencies that we hypothesise are important in managing such KRPs, and which can form the basis for further empirical research

The impact of market orientation on the development of relational capabilities and performance outcomes: the case of Russian industrial firms

The article investigates the role of market orientation as an antecedent for the development of relational capabilities and performance in Russian industrial firms. We test the direct role of different aspects of market orientation on business performance in comparison to an indirect and mediated influence via improving a firm's ability to become embedded in relational structures. The results of an empirical study demonstrate the differential impact of components of market orientation – customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination – as direct and indirect antecedents of relational capabilities and thus subsequently of overall firm performance. It can be shown that in Russian industrial markets competitor orientation directly and positively impacts on performance, while the other two components of market orientation have only a mediated effect on performance via the development of relational capabilities

Seeking for solutions within a project setting

There has been increasing attention focused on the importance of ‘solution selling’ in the often very close relationships that characterize business-to-business marketing. While an extant predominantly product-centric view of solutions prevails in the literature, this has recently been juxtaposed with a more process-oriented view. We review such a process-oriented solution model briefly, and focus on the managerial challenge of how firms make this process-oriented approach work in practice. We argue that, in parallel to adopting a process-oriented approach, companies also have to focus their attention specifically on how to mobilize the different parties in order to amalgamate the perspectives and orientations between the interacting counterparts. We propose an interaction process model of how this ‘collective mind’ is achieved, using as an example a study of the United Kingdom’s Lean Aerospace Initiative (UK LAI), a large project with a specific solution in mind – improving the global competitiveness of the UK’s Aerospace industry. We use our model to show how the three main groups of actors (Government bodies, four Universities, and the aerospace companies themselves) interact in their pursuit of co-creating their collective solutions