Essays on supplier responsiveness and buyer firm value - Nyenrode ...

5.3 Overall Conclusions
This dissertation focuses on strategic supplier responsiveness, also known as B2B market
orientation, idiosyncratic relational risk, cross-cultural comparisons, and subjective and
objective performance measurement. The extant literature on business-to-business market
orientation includes limited research focusing primarily on interesting questions such as
whether market orientation cultures can be diffused across organizational boundaries
(Siguaw et al., 1998). However, the B2B market orientation as a research domain has
many more interesting questions that need to be answered. In line with market orientation
from the intra-firm perspective, the mediators between the market orientation or
responsiveness strategy and the buyer performance implications are one such avenue.
Particularly, among the wide array of questions one could chose from, risk was a
component that was enticing because of the macroeconomic factors that have made risk a
key topic of interest and because market orientation is thought to exacerbate intraorganizational
risk. Then, would it logically also apply in the inter-organizational
context? Therefore, our primary research question investigated in Chapter 2 was:
“Does it Make Relational and Financial Sense to be a Responsive Strategic Supplier?”
Our primary research question examined whether the much-touted philosophy of market
orientation mattered in B2B contexts. Our study led us to conclude that it does matter.
Unlike the intra-firm contexts where market orientation is positively related to top
management risk-taking, in strategic B2B contexts, we found that it is negatively related
to IdRR. To buyers, any supplier maneuver matters that reduces their risk; as one
manager remarked, “No buyer penalizes a supplier for making him safe unless he is
completely irrational” (Tanoli, personal communication, 2012). Our results provide
evidence that a strategic supplier market orientation reduced a specific type of relational
risk, IdRR. The importance of the identification of this linkage is that, in the marketing
literature, a lot of emphasis is placed on reducing overall relational risk but not IdRR, the
risk component that matters the most because of its positive influence on intangible
market-based supplier assets and buyer firm performance. Overall, the current chapter
has, to an extent, provided evidence to indicate that supplier responsiveness has strong
performance implications for the buyer and, in addition, implications for the supplier’s
market-based assets.
In Chapter 3, we deal with the question of whether supplier responsiveness
mattered across national cultural barriers. We found that, even with relatively similar
cultures, there are relatively significant changes. For example, in the United States, soft
indicators such as customer satisfaction do not seem to matter much, whereas they do in
the Netherlands. However, the core finding that remains consistent is that IdRR matters
across borders. The conclusions of the second paper are far-reaching. Primarily, it is
avoiding the familiarity trap. Even though markets may seem the same, peculiar cultural
idiosyncrasies do exist. For a marketing manager sitting in Washington or Amsterdam,
this could mean the difference between keeping a client account or losing it. On the other
hand, this finding may seem simplistic to some scholars, but it matters because many
mistakes that do have far reaching results are simplistic. Overall, Chapter 3 has
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