Electronic Markets on customer-orientation
- PDF / 269,270 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 20 Downloads / 212 Views
EDITORIAL
Electronic Markets on customer-orientation Rainer Alt 1
Published online: 8 July 2016 # Institute of Applied Informatics at University of Leipzig 2016
Dear readers of Electronic Markets, It is a popular saying that “The customer is king (or queen)” and most businesses will declare customer-orientation as a major goal in their strategies. Among the claims are to offer the best service to customers and to strive for maximum customer satisfaction and/or experience. The question remains how customer-orientation is actually measured and operationalized beyond being a mere marketing statement. Clearly, customer-orientation is a complex construct that is shaped by many factors. While price is an important determinant in most buying decisions, the overall satisfaction with a seller is influenced by many qualitative aspects as well, i.e. the mood (s)he is in, the time constraints of the transaction, the financial status of the buyer, the interaction with the seller’s representative or systems or the match with the customer’s expectations of the product/service and the like. In addition, marketing literature suggests that each encounter also needs to be considered in a longer relational context, meaning that customers – especially in the business-to-business segment – undertake repeated transactions, which lead to a transaction history and longer-term relationships.
Two concepts of customer-orientation Early research on electronic markets has strongly focused on the market aspects. For example, Bakos (1991, p. 298) reports that electronic markets reduce the costs involved in
* Rainer Alt [email protected] 1
Information Systems Institute, University of Leipzig, Grimmaische Str. 12, 04109 Leipzig, Germany
comparison shopping, which help to decrease seller profits and increase buyer welfare. Research has confirmed these effects for business-to-consumer (b2c) transactions, but found these advantages to be less relevant in the business-tobusiness (b2b) field (Glassberg and Merhout 2007). This follows the argumentation of Clemons et al. (1993), who favor network governance over atomistic market transactions to safeguard partner-specific investments as well as non-contractible issues. In the b2c domain, it has also been the desire of marketing strategists to escape a pure competition based on price by – often only slightly – differentiating their products via additional services or by establishing strong brands (Ancarani 2002). Although these instruments are meant to increase customer loyalty, they illustrate that customer-orientation from the seller perspective is not equal to what buyers regard as customer-orientation. Sellers intend to make comparison shopping more difficult and to “develop” customers in repeated purchases to maximize metrics, such as customer lifetime value. Buyers, however, appreciate transparency in a market and also choose offerings from competing sellers. They might see benefits in becoming locked-in with a specific vendor, but require some additional value, e.g. discounts or improved
Data Loading...
