Value Co-Creation in Industrial Buyer-Seller Partnerships ... - Doria

Although the Buyer has a riding crew, they still need support for the riding crew from theSeller. They expect the Seller to provide training for the crew and supervision of demandingjobs. The Seller does provide it, but somewhat reluctantly.“ And our task is to train the riding crew so that they will be able to take care of thejob… and we do it… ” (Interview: Seller 1)The riding crew episode can be seen as a failure for the partnership, and a failure innegotiating and making use of each other’ s resources in an optimal way. However, there isalso another side to this matter, when looking at it in retrospect; for one it has forced theSeller to reassess their offering, and for another it gave the Buyer customer relationship theattention of the Seller management, attention that enabled the Seller to mobilize resourcesand take action in order not to lose the whole customer relationship. In other words, aconflict in the relationship has had positive effects, when assessing the situation inretrospect. The positive effect of conflict in buyer-seller relationships has been recognizedin previous empirical studies (Anderson & Narus 1990, Dwyer et al.1987).“ Yes, well there are still people who fight this, they think that we should try to sellman-hours… this is our business. BR9 does not want this to be our business, he wantsour business to be to support the Buyer in all possible ways in order for the engines todo well, condition-based maintenance, communicate about breakdowns we have hadetc. There are a number of other products that we can sell.” (Interview: Seller 2)” So we could take from the Seller, take SR5 and a couple of other guys, grab them anddo it ourselves. That is basically what we did with Mr BR4 and Mr BR1 and Mr BR12.We took away three and did it ourselves. So it is from such a concept it started (theriding crew) … and there is no chance they will get it back from us anymore, this isours… ” (Interview: Buyer15)6.3.3 The Seller loses a major deal to competitorIn 1999 the Buyer started building the NN Class vessels. The Seller lost the main enginedeal to a competitor as the Buyer chose to install gas turbines on the vessels. The decision tochoose competing gas turbines was to a large extent a decision based on environmentalconsiderations. Gas turbines were at the time seen as the new, promising environmentallyfriendly alternative. This was a big loss for the Seller, but at the same time an incident thatspurred the development and launching of the Seller’ s new environmentally sound enginetechnology.110