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This paper explores the value of the final customer in business networks. The preferences of the final customer define the concept of the network customer. The central argument of this paper is that companies within networks of value-creating relationships can act as integrators, which by interlocking limited value perspectives, can approximate an absolute value horizon that includes network customer considerations. Such interlocking activity constitutes a managerial challenge. As such, the interconnecting activity extends companies’ value horizons and can be characterized as a relationship capability, which is managerial knowledge capital that is not residing within isolated organizational actors but within the interrelations between them. Accordingly, such knowledge becomes a significant resource that can be used by both the organizations to improve their network position. By deconstructing the notion of value, this paper demonstrates the need for greater conceptual clarity and operationalization of value in the wider field of marketing, and specifically for business-to-business marketing.

This paper deals with contemporary ways of implementing strategies using the logic of real options. Key objective of the study is to describe and explain how organisations develop and execute the strategies to achieve their objectives. The paper attempts to develop a new view of strategy implementation by utilising the recent advances in the area of real options. Based on empirical observations in manufacturer-retailer networks, the new view does not consider strategy as the ultimate concept of the company’s positioning or direction in the market but as an inventive stream of enacting what is possible for each organisation in its respective network. While organisations react to events as they unfold, implementing strategies takes the form of creating and enacting a number of real options that best reflect the organisations’ competencies and their capacities derived from network membership.

In their paper “Fractals, stories, and the development of coherence in strategic logic,” Janice Black, Frances Fabian, and Kim Hinrichs explore key communication dynamics that drive the emergence of a coherent strategic logic in an organization. Using a longitudinal study of a non-profit organization in the health and caring industry, the authors use “fractals” as a metaphor for organizational processes that help to crystallize a clear, coherent, and well understood statement of an organization’s strategic logic. Their study also suggests how the mathematical rules that govern the iterative generation of fractals in nature can be applied to develop a “mathematics of social systems.” The authors’ analysis of strategy processes in the subject organization shows how the use of storytelling through internal organizational publications can contribute substantially to the emergence of a coherent strategic logic and supporting value system within an organization.

This first paper examines total benefits and total costs of product–service designs as antecedents to customer value assessment. It introduces the reader to all the papers in this volume. The first half of the paper offers a model of customer value assessment. This section describes research studies in industrial marketing contexts that illustrate the core propositions in the model. The second half of the paper provides brief introductions to the papers in this volume; these papers offer further evidence supporting the view that discontinuous innovations offer superior customer value but customers tend to eventually become increasingly comfortable with the status quo and move away from adopting superior proven technologies. This paper advocates being mindful of the marketplace dynamics affecting value. The volume serves to increase knowledge and understanding of the dynamic forces affecting changes in customer value.