Success variables in business-to-business relationships
Thursday, January 7th, 2010Bagdonienė, Liudmila; Žilionė, Rasa. Success variables in business-to-business relationships // Development of Services World: New Thinking, New Actions [elektroninis išteklius]: proceedings of 4th international scientific seminar, October 16-17, 2009, Kaunas, Lithuania / Kaunas University of Technology. Kaunas: KTU EMTC, 2009. ISBN 9789955257264. p. [1-8].
Abstract:
Many contacts are based on human relations. The relationship might be considered as a process of developing mutual understanding and the mutual creation of value with clients over the lifetime of an association. The businesses of relationship age are leveraging knowledge about their network of relationships, including customers and other market‟s actors (e.g. employees, partners, providers, investors) for transforming their products and services into memorable experiences that create unique value. The wealth embedded into customer relationships is now more important than the capital contained in the land, factories, buildings, goods and even bank accounts. According to Galbreath, the relationship age is the pathway of economic success.
In most business-to-business (B2B) exchanges, seek for building and sustaining long-term relationships serves as a key target for successful business activities. Companies more and more often pay attention to the successful relationships among business partners for mutual benefit. Importance of relationships between B2B firms and their customers is stressed by Turnbull et al. (1996). Ford et al. (2003) highlight that management of organisation relationships among all business partners and its position in the business network have become the critical task on which a company‟s very existence stands or falls.
Different aspects of business-to-business (B2B) relationship development – lifecycle of relationship, client involvement, confidentiality, relationship quality, trust, commitment and etc. – are analyzed in publications.
Although there are numerous researches in field of business-to-business (B2B) relationships and its impact on business success or failure, but still success variables in business-to-business (B2B) relationships are not investigated in detail. Thus, problem of the paper may be identified in the following: what variables affect relationships and how they lead to business success?
The aim of the paper is to systematize what variables affect the success of business-to-business (B2B) relationships.