Market offer development : industrial experiences in a business-to-business context

Sammanfattning: A company’s competitive advantage is best understood in its ability to fill its relationships with a unique and meaningful value. Especially in business-to-business relationships value is complex and abstract, so complex that the product alone is not a meaningful representation of that value. Rather, the complete set of values represented by the company’s market offer needs to be considered. A market offer could be seen as the carrier of all values in a relationship. It contains both products and services but its essence is far more complex and multi dimensional than simply the combination thereof. While marketing scholars especially within the fields of service and relationship marketing have discussed the need for new or alternative product constructs, or conceptualisations, to embody this set of values, they have not addressed the issue from the point of view of actually develop a market offer. And while scholars within the field of product development research have been concerned with understanding how to practically manage product development – also presenting a number of best practice models – they have been limited by the context of the product as a physical artefact. There is an apparent gap between these two fields of research. Drawing on the knowledge on both these fields this work contributes to the filling of this gap by means of answering two main research questions: 1. How can a market offer be conceptualised to support its development? 2. What constitutes a market offer development process? In addition this work has also addressed how the product as such is affected by being part of larger solution and examined the possibility of expanding the product platform concept to include the complete market offer. To answer these questions four studies have been carried out during a period of three and a half years between April 2000 and June 2003. The first was an explorative survey covering 8 companies with the purpose of sharpening the problem formulation and to get a broad industrial view of the problem area. The second was a case study where the phenomenon was studied more in-depth based on the models of the first study. On this followed two participative studies at two different companies, each for a period of six months. In both these studies I was a fully participating member of a project team. On the second occasion, I also initiated the project and had a coordinating function. Both research questions have been answered by means of different models. Each model is a graphical framework with a description. These models are also verified in practice by means of implementation in the final participating research project. On research question one an important finding is that the current conceptualisation, made from a marketing perspective, is not detailed enough to support the management of developing market offers. Instead a model with three layers has been developed. These three layers are: the product & service layer; the business solutions layer; and the customer interaction layer. Between these layers different types of relationships have been identified. On research question two this project presents the first description of a market offer development process and clarify its relationship to currently published product as well as service development processes. Verifying findings of current marketing research it is found to be a continuous process rather than a process with a clearly defined start or end. It is found to be the continuous management of: the customer portfolio; products and services; commercial logic and business solutions; customer interaction; the resource structure; internal marketing efforts to facilitate internal change and overcome political and cultural boundaries; business analysis and follow-up to ensure profitability.