Looking at Your World Through Your Customer's Eyes: Cross-National Differences in Buyer-Seller Alliances

摘要

There has been a great deal of discussion about firms moving away from transactions towards building long-term relationships with key customers. This is especially true in business-to-business markets and with larger companies with major customer accounts. But what is the reality of the situation? What do we find when we move beyond the rhetoric of relationship marketing to examining the extent of customer focus in large firms? This paper describes a major empirical study of some of the world's largest B2B buyer-seller alliances in five countries representing each element of the Triad-England, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. We find that there are significant gaps between how customer focused manufacturers think they are and how customer focused their key customers perceive them to be. Further, these gaps vary by country and region. We explore the reasons for these differences in the context of cross-cultural organizational theory with implications for the strategic management of cross-national buyer-seller alliances.