Читать книгу Value Merchants - Nirmalya Kumar - Страница 23

In acquiring products and services, customer managers must decide which suppliers’ market offerings will fulfill a set of requirements and preferences. When more than one supplier’s market offering successfully fulfills these, customer managers then must decide which supplier’s offering will deliver the greatest value to their firm. In many instances customer managers make this decision intuitively, simply choosing the offering that they feel is best (or, alternatively, that has the lowest price). Little or no effort is given to specifically defining what each manager means by “value” and how it might be estimated in monetary terms. As an example, customer managers may feel that it is not worthwhile to conduct a formal value assessment to acquire repositionable sticky notes and instead simply purchase 3M Post-it Notes, even if the price for them is slightly higher than lesser-known or generic brands.

In other instances, though, customer managers consider it worthwhile to conduct a formal assessment, or value analysis, to make a better informed decision. Progressive suppliers may assist customer managers in these assessments or even provide their own assessments of how their offerings deliver superior customer value. Customer value management focuses on these latter instances, where conceptualizing what exactly is meant by “value” and how to estimate it in practice are of principal interest.⁵

Customer firms often do not have an accurate understanding of what suppliers’ market offerings actually are worth to them. Certainly, customers may understand their own requirements, but they do not necessarily know what fulfilling these requirements is worth to them, how differing ways of meeting these requirements affect their costs, or what changes in these requirements would be worth to them. As an example, Grainger tells its customers that acquisition costs often exceed the price of an item, particularly in the case of maintenance, repair, and operating supplies. We present a Grainger advertisement in figure 2-1 that illustrates this persuasively.