CONVINCING A SUPPLIER TO BE ITS PREFERRED CUSTOMER – A CASE STUDY

Nathalie Merminod (), Nollet Jean () and Claudia Rebolledo
Additional contact information
Nathalie Merminod: CRET-LOG - Centre de Recherche sur le Transport et la Logistique - AMU - Aix Marseille Université
Nollet Jean: HEC Montréal - HEC Montréal
Claudia Rebolledo: HEC Montréal - HEC Montréal

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: To perform well, firms need competent suppliers who are ready to invest time and resources. However, the best suppliers can choose the clients that they prefer to work closely with; therefore, clients have to compete for these suppliers' attention and find ways to become more attractive. Developing different relationships with suppliers according to the role they are expected to play for the firm is vital (Bensaou, 1999) and, regardless of the nature of the relationship, it is important to define and implement appropriate operating procedures to develop a cooperative advantage (Kanter, 1994) or a collaborative advantage (Dyer, 2000). Marketing strategies used by clients to attract customers are well studied; the "other side" of the attractiveness issue exists as well (Brokaw and Davidson, 1978; Leenders and Blenkhorn, 1988). More recently, the related concepts of customer attractiveness, supplier satisfaction, and preferential customer status have interested several researchers in supply management. In this empirical research we decided to focus on the concept of "preferred customer". Since this concept is complex and strongly determined by contextual factors, we chose the case study method as an explanatory method (Johnston et al., 1999; Dubois and Araujo, 2007), to understand how a purchasing firm can convince a supplier to be its preferred customer.

Keywords: preferred customer; purchasing; reverse marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07-20
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in World Marketing Congress, Jul 2016, Paris, France

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01459897

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().