Search results

Marketing metrics represent a growing concern for practitioners and scholars alike. Among the performance measures at the individual account level, customer share emerges as a concept of growing interest, yet marketing lacks rigorous customer share metrics in business markets. In addition, the construct's position within the nomological net of relationship marketing in a business-to-business (B2B) context remains unclear. This research reports findings of a cross-sectional study among purchasing managers in U.S. manufacturing industries, which indicate a positive link between customer value and customer share in business relationships. Relationship benefits have a stronger impact on customer share than do relationship costs, such that sourcing and operations benefits appear to represent the most promising levers for effective customer share management. The results finally suggest that researchers should operationalize customer share in relative terms when investigating key supplier relationships across different industries.

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.