Profiling marketing concepts adopted and resources influencing local suppliers’ perception of business-customer exchange relations

Abstract

The purpose of this research study is to investigate how local (Malta) home goods suppliers’ use concepts from academic literature in their business model practices. The aim is to determine which marketing concepts are mostly adopted within the market and to which degree such measures affect the suppliers’ perceived value of established business-customer relations. The objectives of the study comprise also other factors, namely financial and non-financial that might influence this apparent value of exchange relations. The study is based on a literature review revolving around subjects of transactional and relationship marketing and small and family businesses. Suppliers were approached by a web hosted questionnaire drawn up after a thorough content analysis of the literature and preliminary informal interviews. A sample of 105 respondents was gathered through email and analysed through descriptive statistics with the aid of SPSS and Survey Monkey software applications. General findings of the study show that local suppliers use both transactional and relationship marketing concepts to approach their business customers. This is done by categorizing the importance of the relation and adopting measures accordingly to level of value perceived. The study was also able to outline which factors mostly affect suppliers in their journey towards successful survival and growth. Findings suggest that suppliers make an extra effort in serving better business-customers that provide more value to them. On the other hand suppliers cannot afford to lose even straight forward transactional exchanges as the limitations of the market does not allow for discarding any source of higher turnovers. As such resources to these type of firms are essential in determining whether they survive, fail or succeed in the market. The main conclusions of the study suggest that the paradigm shift discussed by previous authors between transactional and relationship marketing has not completely been adopted within this market. Findings also conclude that sales representatives are critical in achieving successful relations with business customers and as such investments should be directed to this resource. Other findings suggest that discrepancy between actual market provisions and expectations should be addressed in order to improve customer retention rates. The implications of the study include that suppliers are being highly impacted by their lack of implementing strict credit terms onto their suppliers, for which the study recommends to be handled by higher management personnel in order to avoid tensions on the key role of the sales representatives. The model being represented by the study is confirmed once the constructs and variables adopted are tested from the business-buyer side of the exchange relation. As for future research, the study recommends delving deeper into key exchange contact points as represented by sales representatives and family business and members’ market issues.