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

3.4.1 Overview of the use of the value concept in marketingWroe Alderson (1957) has been one of the early scholars in developing marketing theory.Alderson was the one who introduced the idea of marketing being the process of matchingheterogeneous demand and supply through exchange. Exchange became thus one of thecentral themes of marketing. The way Alderson defined value in marketing in the fifties is:“ ...marketing is, in fact, the source of all ultimate value in use. Value can be createdthrough exchange even when restricted to products as they occur in nature, withoutbeing subject to any manufacturing processes” (Alderson 1957, p 198).The Aldersonian view on value in marketing being created in the process of exchange givessupport to the idea brought forth in this study, that value cannot be viewed as a static thing.Value is dynamic; it is created through interaction through a process of exchange. Now letus turn to some of the more recent writings about value within marketing.Walter el al. (2001) are studying value from the supplier’ s perspective by using“ functions of a customer relationship” as a way to categorize how the supplier perceivesvalue. They talk about direct and indirect functions and mention that a third type offunctions, namely social functions, could be added to make the picture more complete. Bydirect functions of a customer relationship they mean: the profit function, the volumefunction, and the safeguard function. Indirect functions are: the innovation function, themarket function, the scout function, and the access function. They argue that the “ supplierperceivedvalue” consists of the above-mentioned functions of a customer relationship (p369).Wilson et al. (1994, 1995) suggest that value can be understood as competence, marketposition, and social rewards (Wilson et al., 1994, 1995, Biong et al. 1997).Ulaga (2001) uses the term “ customer value” and has three different perspectives onthe concept; the “ buyer perspective” , “ the supplier perspective” , and “ the buyer-sellerperspective” . The buyer perspective deals with issues such as how the supplier can createofferings that are of superior value to the customer and thus keep the business inincreasingly competitive markets. The supplier perspective looks at customers as key assetsof the firm. The buyer-seller perspective is about how buyers and sellers can create valuejointly through relationships, partnering, and alliances (p 316).Dyer and Singh (1998) discuss the concept “ relational rent” , meaning the value that theparties can get out of a relationship. They argue that effective governance of a relationshipcan generate relational rents by either lowering transaction costs or providing incentives for49