Why do your customers prefer to buy from you and not from your competitors? In the past three years, marketing professor Mark Vandenbosch and Niraj Dawar put this question to more than 1,500 senior executives in interviews and group discussions. And, despite the wide range of industries are the leaders they studied, the answers they got were surprisingly similar: Customers often appreciate how they interact with their suppliers as much or more than they are actually buying. The main factors of customer choice, executives cited cost-oriented factors such as convenience, ease of doing business, and product support, and risk-based factors such as trust, confidence and strength of the relationship. The strategy is built around the customer interaction to reduce the costs and risks offer a systematic way to attract new sources of customer value, while avoiding the often futile attempt to compete on product innovation. The authors illustrate the five different strategies that some companies use to create a sustainable advantage. "Hide
by All Vandenbosch, Niraj Dawar Source: MIT Sloan Management Review 10 pages. Publication Date: July 1, 2002. Prod. #: SMR084-PDF-ENG
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