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

started paying attention to issues relating to inconsistency between rational argumentationand provable facts on one hand, and the actual feeling or atmosphere of the relationship onthe other. Sometimes there had been considerable problems with a delivery or a product, butstill the customer was quite satisfied. At other times there seemed to be no way for thesupplier to make the customer happy: no matter how well they performed technically, thecustomer would complain. It seemed as if people, irrespective of whether they acted onbehalf of a company in a specific role, often based their opinions much more on intuitionand feelings than on rational, logically reasoned facts.The working experience of carrying out the above-mentioned interviews awakened myinterest in relationships and, more specifically, in relationships between suppliers andcustomers on industrial markets. In such a context people act on behalf of a company, butstill put a lot of themselves into the formalized relationship. This usually happens becausethe relationships tend to be long term in nature. Actually it seems that the people involvedstart being more and more personally involved in their business relationships. Theirbusiness partners become their friends over the years, and their business life and personallife start to intertwine. Why it is of relevance for the study to mention this is that Ipersonally, with the experience I have, feel that people and personal relationships have agreat impact on business relationships. It is important that this is said because thisconviction has certainly guided my research process and the things I tend to pay attention towhen I act as a researcher. This also influences my choices of case for the study and thethings I choose to discuss in my interviews.The fact that business relationships seem to a great extent to rely on personalrelationships and that the smoothness of business interaction often depends on theindividuals involved is obviously a great risk for the company in question. As aconsequence of realizing this, I started to take interest in organizational issues – how themanagement of important customer relationships should be organized so that the abovementionedrisk would be minimized. The idea was that if there were standardizedprocedures and management models for the management of such customer relationships, thesuccess and continuation of them would be less dependent on single individuals and theirrelationships. At this point the BIG question seemed to be how companies should organisetheir customer relationship management so that it would be less dependent on individualsand less of a risk for the company. This is where I started the actual Ph.D study. Initially thefocus of interest was on organizational issues, but as I got familiar with the thoughts of theIMP school and received comments on my proposal, it gradually became evident that Ishould do something that would be in-depth and exploratory, as I have good access to acompany with a number of interesting relationships to study. Gradually the decision to35