Value-Based Differentiation in Business Relationships: Gaining and Sustaining Key Supplier Status

Abstract

Many business customers today consolidate their supply bases and implement preferred supplier programs. Consequently, vendors increasingly face the alternative of either gaining a key supplier status with their customers or being pushed into the role of a backup supplier. As product and price become less important differentiators, suppliers of routinely purchased products search for new ways to differentiate themselves in a buyer–seller relationship. This research investigates avenues for differentiation through value creation in business-to-business relationships. The results suggest that relationship benefits display a stronger potential for differentiation in key supplier relationships than cost considerations. The authors identify service support and personal interaction as core differentiators, followed by a supplier's know-how and its ability to improve a customer's time to market. Product quality and delivery performance, along with acquisition costs and operation costs, display a moderate potential to help a firm gain and maintain key supplier status. Finally, price shows the weakest potential for differentiation.

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 — 242 citations exist upstream.

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