Customer Experience and Experiential Value in Organizational Buying: A Component Model Based Study

摘要

Executive-vendor relationships involve many vendors vying for the lifetime value of buyers through relationships with executives.Vendor relationships are key to competitive advantage(McKenna, 1993;Vavra, 1992;Naumann, 1995)and corporates are moving towards relationship orientation forming value creating networks(lacobucci D, 1996).Relationship marketing theory posits that relationship quality or strength of the relationship guide behavior in a relationship(Storbacka et.al., 1994).Since both quality and strength of the relationship is a subjective concept, it will be perceived differently by each individual involved in the executive-vendor relationship and will be guided by their experience of the relationship in an organizational buying scenario.Caine and Caine(1991)noted that an individual's mindset and emotions influence and organize learning.Learning and responding based on appraisals(Scherer 2009), is an ongoing process and the emotional impact of any event or life experience affects cognition and memory while continuing to reverberate long after the specific event.The component model proposes various levels of appraisal which occur sequentially.Drawing on this central idea, customer experience and experiential value are proposed as sequentially occurring stages in the consumer appraisal process.Individual learnings, experiences, and relationship factors(as implied in the work of Morgan and Hunt, 1994)are carried forward when individuals come together in the buying center.This study extends customer experience concept to executive-vendor relationships while exploring the degenerative and constructive nature of customer experience in an organizational buying scenario.