Understanding Customer Value in Business-to-Business Relationships

ABSTRACT Although literature emphasizes the importance of creating value for the customer in business-to-business marketing, our understanding of this concept is limited. Against this background, this paper examines the antecedents of customer value within the context of business-to-business relationships. In a departure from previous conceptualizations of value, the paper introduces the concept of core benefits and add-on benefits as well as purchasing price, acquisition costs, and operations costs to the business-to-business marketing literature. The impact of product, relational, and supplier characteristics on the perceived benefits and sacrifices are examined. Results from a survey of 981 purchasing managers across multiple manufacturing product categories in the United States and in Germany provide support for the hypotheses proposed in this paper. Managerial implications and directions for future research are identified following a discussion of the results.