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

interests of the yards and owners requires people who have the skills and experience of adelicate situation in a business that is said to be conservative, traditional, and small in thesense that “ everybody knows everybody” . To be an equipment supplier for the ship buildingindustry means that one aims to continue business through repeated purchases. The goal forthe Seller is to stay in business by doing a good job and thus by being considered for thenext new building. The world is a small marketplace in this industry and the importance ofbuilding up good relations and sustaining them is vital for continued business. The customerbase is limited and therefore the impact of reputation on the market is very important; wordof mouth spreads fast in the inner circle.The economic logic for the Seller when selling engines to a ship is that the enginesthemselves are sold on a very competitive market, while the anticipated future business ofproviding service work and selling spare parts is a more sustainable business. Therefore theSeller increasingly focuses on the end-customer, the ship operator at an early stage of theprocess. By offering an interesting package for service and maintenance of the enginesduring the lifetime of the ship, the Seller is likely to attract the interest of the ship owner.The question, whether it is the yard or the owner who makes the decision aboutequipment, seems to vary case-by-case. For certain companies it is quite clear that the shipowner has a strong preference and will decide upon main equipment suppliers, whereas inother cases the shipyard has more influence. Consequently, equipment suppliers have to beaware of the situation for each new project in order to design the suitable sales tactics. Inpractice this seems to be common knowledge within the industry – something that“ everybody who has been around for a while knows” .Recently there have been signs of attempts to gather all three parties of the triad aroundthe same table to cooperate in designing the optimal solution for a cruise ship, a matterwhere the Buyer has been a forerunner. The logic being that by cooperating and solvingthings jointly at an early stage of the project, bringing everybody’ s accumulated specializedknowledge to the table, there would be objectives to be achieved that nobody could do alone(interviews).The focal dyadThe focal dyad for this study is the relationship between the Seller, the diesel enginesupplier, and the Buyer, the cruise ship owner. Even though the shipyard is an importantactor and the relationship with the yard is crucial for both equipment supplier and shipowner, the yard will be left outside of the focus of this study. This is because the studyfocuses on the development of the partnership between the Buyer and the Seller. Includingthe shipyard would make an interesting study, but one with a different focus.92