Читать книгу Value Merchants - Nirmalya Kumar - Страница 21

With its emphasis on assessing customer value in practice, customer value management requires a conceptualization of customer value that is well reasoned, comprehensive, and easily grasped. We start by defining customer value: “Value in business markets is the worth in monetary terms of the technical, economic, service, and social benefits a customer firm receives in exchange for the price it pays for a market offering.”³ We elaborate next on some aspects of this definition.

First, we express value in monetary terms, such as dollars per unit, euros per liter, or renminbi per hour. Economists may care about “utils,” but we have never met a manager who did!

Second, we can conceptually represent any market offering as a set of economic, technical, service, and social benefits that a customer firm receives. By “benefits,” we mean net benefits, which include any costs a customer incurs in obtaining the desired benefits, except for purchase price.

Third, value is what a customer firm gets in exchange for the price it pays. Raising or lowering the price does not change the set of benefits that an offering delivers to customers, only the willingness of those customers to purchase the offering. Thus, we conceptually view a market offering as having two elemental characteristics: its value and its price. That we do not include price as part of customer value is a critical distinction between our conceptualization and many others. To us, having price as a part of value adds considerable confusion. If we were to include price, we could significantly improve the value of our offering simply by cutting price dramatically, which goes against what most suppliers have in mind when they think of improving the value of their offerings to customers. It also goes against the fundamental concept of exchange in markets, where customers exchange money (i.e., price) with suppliers for offerings that the customers value.⁴

Finally, we contend that customer value in business markets is a comparative concept in which customers assess the value of a given market offering relative to what they regard as the next-best alternative to it. There always is an alternative. It might be:

1 A market offering from a competitor using comparable, or alternative, technology to fulfill the customer’s requirements and preferences. This is the most frequently encountered situation in business markets.

2 The customer’s decision to source an item from an outside supplier or to make the item itself. An example is a company that decides to outsource a part of its IT operations to an Indian supplier.

3 The status quo (i.e., not doing anything). Companies deciding whether to expand their facilities or purchasing management consulting services are examples.

4 The most recent offering from the same supplier. A challenge that Microsoft had, for example, was persuading its customers to upgrade from its Windows NT/2000 Server to its Windows XP Server when many of them still were satisfied with the performance of NT/2000 Server.