Kamran Razmdoost

Towards a service-led relationship in project-based firms

Project-based firms increasingly apply practices that are in line with relationship marketing (RM), which is a shift from individuality to mutuality, and service-dominant logic (SDL), which is a shift from a focus on goods exchange to an emphasis on service exchange. These firms also adopt value co-creation processes, benefiting from both RM and SDL views. However, their overall transition towards RM, SDL and/or both is not clearly understood. Therefore, the research aim is to explain how and why project-based firms have moved away from transitional marketing. A retrospective action research between 2002 and 2009 provides process data on how a single main contractor adapted their marketing approach over five publicly funded projects within the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. The findings show that the uniqueness and dynamics of projects necessitate the adoption of both SDL and RM, a view that is entitled the service-led relationship here. This transition occurs through services expansion, multi-level distributed interactions and process-oriented performance management in projects. The firm enabled the transition through the evolution of both institutional mechanisms such as contracts and organizational structure, and people attributes such as capabilities and culture.

Value Co-creation in Project Exchange

Contemporary scholars define value creation as the process of extracting value from the use of resources by a customer (Gronroos and Voima 2013). Value co-creation is a unique form of value creation where two or more actors such as a customer and a provider create value in a direct interaction and through a joint process (Gronroos and Voima 2013). Direct interaction refers to the actors’ actions that are merged into a collaborative, dialogical process (Gronroos and Gummerus 2014). In these definitions, value refers to value-in-use signifying that value is perceived by the customer in a specific use situation (Vargo and Lusch 2008) through “an interactive, relativistic preference experience” (Holbrook 1996, p. 138).

Managing value co-creation/destruction: a longitudinal education capital programme/project case study

Drawing on a longitudinal empirical study of an education capital programme/project, value interactions are investigated at the interface between programme customers, project stakeholders and construction providers. Empirical evidence is provided that value formation is not only associated with value co-creation, but also with value co-destruction. The case study showed that a mature and synergistic network relationship (that successfully aligned the expectations of a strong key account management team (KAM team), multi-headed customer and wider project stakeholders) could, if not well managed, turn into incongruent relationships, relationship uncoupling and resource withdrawal. These findings suggest that project managers must drive strong KAM team relationships, so that they can align and adapt to customer requirements, and control the response to often changing wider stakeholder expectations.

Overconfidence and Underconfidence in Usage Experience

Consumers’ subjective assessment of their knowledge (i.e., knowledge confidence) often does not match their actual knowledge (Alba and Hutchinson 2000). This phenomenon is called knowledge miscalibration. Although previous research investigated the effect of knowledge miscalibration on purchasing decisions (e.g., Alba and Hutchinson 2000; Burson 2007; Kidwell et al. 2008), its role in the usage stage of consumption is little understood. Consumer value as “an interactive, relativistic preference experience” (Holbrook 1996 p.138) reflects consumers’ evaluation of usage. Our aim is to investigate how knowledge miscalibration relates to the dimensions of consumer value. We focused on the four self-oriented dimensions of consumer value in Holbrook’s (1994) framework. Specifically, consumer value is hereby decomposed in efficiency, excellence, play and aesthetics. Furthermore, we conceptualise the relationship between knowledge miscalibration and consumer value separately for overconfidence (i.e., positive knowledge miscalibration) and underconfidence (i.e., negative knowledge miscalibration), as each of these two dimensions of knowledge miscalibration stimulate different behavioural mechanisms.