Christian Homburg, Sabine Kuester, Nikolas Beutin, and Ajay Menon
Executive Summary
In this article, Christian Homburg, Sabine Kuester, Nikolas Beutin, and Ajay Menon examine the concept of customer benefits in business-to-business markets in an international context. They conceptualize customer benefits as core and add-on benefits and discuss product quality, service quality, supplier flexibility, trust, joint action, and supplier commitment as determinants of these customer benefits. The authors posit that product quality, service quality, and trust have a positive impact on the perceived core benefits and that joint action, flexibility, and commitment have a positive impact on the add-on benefits. However, perceptions of benefits are also shaped by national cultures, and therefore the authors investigate how perceptions are idiosyncratically developed relative to culture. This is important for suppliers whose customer base is located in multiple countries, because knowledge about what drives perceptions of benefits can help suppliers evaluate global differentiation potential and establish a basis for global market segmentation.
To test their hypotheses, the authors gathered data from purchasing managers in the United States and Germany. The mail survey yielded 981 responses that revealed insights into buyer–seller relationships in these two culturally different countries. Cultural indicators are uncertainty avoidance and individualism from the Hofstede model. The United States is a very individualistic country that is moderate in uncertainty avoidance, whereas Germany is a moderately individualistic country that is high in uncertainty avoidance.
The results suggest the importance of understanding the determinants for providing customer benefits. The authors find strong effects of trust and product quality on perceived core benefits and a strong effect of supplier commitment on perceived add-on benefits. Furthermore, the authors observe significant cultural differences with respect to the impact of different determinants on perceived customer benefits. The effect of product quality on the core benefits is significantly higher in cultural settings that display greater uncertainty avoidance and are less individualistic. Trust has significantly less of an impact in cultures that display less uncertainty avoidance and are more individualistic. The analysis also shows that cross-cultural differences significantly moderate the relationship between commitment of the supplier and add-on benefits.
This study offers a valuable contribution to relationship marketing research. The authors provide important insights into the determinants of the two key constructs, core and add-on benefits, in business-to-business relationships. Although many studies on relationship marketing are based on national data sets, this research emphasizes a significant cross-cultural effect for the conceptualization of customer benefits. This is in accordance with the proposition that the ability to break down cultural barriers and establish relationships is a major success factor in international business-to-business marketing.
Biography
Christian Homburg is Chair of the Marketing Department at the University of Mannheim.
Sabine Kuester is Professor of International Marketing and Management in the Department of International Marketing and Management at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. She received her master’s degree from the University of Cologne and her doctoral degree from the London Business School at the University of London. Her areas of interest include marketing modeling, technology marketing, and international marketing. Her articles have been published in European Business Forum, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, and Journal of Marketing.
Nikolas Beutin is Managing Director and Partner at Professor Homburg & Partner.
Ajay Menon is Dean and Professor of Marketing in the College of Business at Colorado State University. He received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Bombay, India; his MBA from the University of Texas–Pam American; and his doctoral degree in Marketing from the University of North Texas. His areas of interest include marketing strategy and new product development. He has published in European Journal of Marketing and Journal of Business Research.
Journal of International Marketing, Vol. 13, No. 3, September 2005
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