Purpose – As companies become more aware of their role in the business network and their own value contribution hereto, the question of the companies’ sourcing strategy and use of suppliers has simultaneously come more and more into focus of their decision making. The purpose of this paper...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the multiplicity of norms in inter‐company cooperation in the context of an SME export group. It will show that the strategic interests of the parties call for more diversity in norms than that identified in existing studies on relational exchange....

Purpose – This paper aims to look at what CRM 2.0 is and how it impacts customer insights. It will show how CRM 2.0's incorporation of social tools and strategies with traditional operational functions meets the demands of twenty‐first century “social” customers....

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to investigate how product‐centric businesses (PCBs), operating in a business‐to‐business environment, develop industrial services to align with their services strategies and sources of market differentiation. PCBs are companies whose businesses were...

Purpose – This article aims to introduce the service function concept, as well as why and how it can be a useful concept for addressing service management challenges in industrial firms. Design/methodology/approach – Two in‐depth case studies of global industrial firms enabled a thorough...

Purpose – Most firms have a number of unprofitable customer relationships that drain the firms' resources. However, firms in general and sales representatives in particular hesitate to address this problem and, ultimately, to terminate business relationships. This paper therefore aims to...

Much of strategy has been about defense, building the largest castle with the thickest walls to defend position, and tying down the customer with switching costs, standards, and transaction costs. The digital age changed that, making ineffective the usual competitive advantages of size and...

Providing customers with value is often not enough for a company to operate profitably. While ensuring that a product or service offers value to users and customers, there must be a conscious plan to capture a portion of that value. This is called monetization (turning value into money) and is...

Purpose – To describe reasons why companies make bad strategy decisions despite having the most capable, motivated, experienced, well‐equipped strategists in history. To recommend practical changes companies can implement to improve strategy decision‐making. Design/methodology/approach –...

Purpose – To convey the findings of an investigation into the relationship between poetry and business thinking, which began with the hypothesis that regular reading and analysis of poetry and its levels of meaning, subtle verbal and nonverbal contextual nuances, emotional content, and...