Portfolio of supplier-customer relationships

Abstract

The main body of research on industrial marketing over the last 20 years has concentrated on giving a relational framework to an activity which had previously been understood to be essentially transactional. Therefore, the management of business relationships is today considered as a critical task on which a company's very existence depends. Consequently, allotting limited company resources between several relationships has become a major task for marketers who must decide how to divide and allot time and money for customers and prospective customers. In this renewed context, the portfolio concept for supplier-customer relationships are of a continuous nature and when the boundaries of the customer are easy to delimit. In order to widen the scope of their relevance, we propose to re-embed the supplier-customer relationship into the network of business actors that influences it and to be very careful in defining who is the customer.

Citation

Salle, R., Cova, B. and Pardo, C. (2001), "Portfolio of supplier-customer relationships", Woodside, A.G. (Ed.) Getting Better at Sensemaking (Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 419-442. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1069-0964(00)09015-3