Determinants of Vendor Patronage in Business Service Markets: An Integrative Model

Abstract

This paper advances a conceptual model of vendor selection and patronage by customers of industrial and business services. The model draws on three literatures: industrial buyer behavior, service quality, and relationship marketing. The model distinguishes between pre-purchase and post-use assessments, and considers the determinants for each stage separately. At each stage, patronage is posited to be driven by: perceived service quality, trust, and perceived value. In addition to the technical and functional quality discussed in the current services literature, business service customers assess vendors for their long-term business commitments for initial patronage decision, and for evidence of trust building behaviors in the ongoing relationship for re-patronage decisions. Propositions based on the model are advanced, and important future research directions and managerial implications of the model are suggested.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.