Liem Viet Ngo

Examining the Firm's Value Creation Process: A Managerial Perspective of the Firm's Value Offering Strategy and Performance

The primary pursuit of any business is to understand what customers value and to create that value for them. While customers are the final arbiter of value, it is the firms role to explore, interpret and deliver value based on what they believe customers are seeking. Based on this premise we adopt the firms perspective on value creation to extend both Bowman and Ambrosinis theoretical framework and the work of DeSarbo, Jedidi and Sinha and focus on two issues. The first is the strategic emphasis firms place on the design and delivery of their value offering. The second is the extent the firms value offering explains performance differentials at the customer-centric performance level. We present a conceptual model of how firms gain positional advantage via their value offering and the realized outcomes they achieve. We present two approaches to modelling the firms value offering (type II and type IV models) and articulate the theoretical underpinnings and results for these models. Our results validate the conceptualization of the firms value offering and suggest that creating superior value offerings enables firms to achieve superiority in customer-centric performance.

Performance implications of market orientation, marketing resources, and marketing capabilities

Abstract Drawing on the competitive capability theory, this paper examines how market orientation, marketing resources, and marketing capabilities contribute to firm performance. The empirical results show that being market oriented influences the level of marketing resources firms possess and the capability to deploy such resources. The findings show marketing resources and marketing capabilities are significant drivers of firm performance, and their impact is greater when they are complementary to each other.

Relationship marketing in Vietnam: an empirical study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to answer two research questions: does relationship marketing orientation (RMO) have an impact on customer satisfaction; and do the individual components of RMO have the same impact on customer satisfaction?Design/methodology/approach – The above questions were answered in the context of an emerging economy using 174 responses obtained from executives of business‐to‐business firms in Vietnam.Findings – The findings show that among key components of RMO, trust, bonding, shared value, and reciprocity have positive influence on customer satisfaction, while communication and empathy have not. Interestingly, trust and bonding are better than shared value and reciprocity in satisfying customers.Research limitations/implications – The use of cross‐sectional data does not allow the interpretation of the time sequence of the relationships among RMO components and customer satisfaction.Practical implications – Managers in developing economies do not jeopardise relationship mar...

Achieving customer satisfaction in services firms via branding capability and customer empowerment

Purpose – The goal of this paper is to investigate how market sensing (market orientation) and customer linking capabilities (service branding and customer empowerment capabilities) enable firms to achieve superiority in customer satisfaction.Design/methodology/approach – To achieve this goal, a conceptual model was developed, specifying the mediating role of branding and customer empowerment capabilities in the relationship between market orientation and customer satisfaction. The model was tested using partial least squares, on 266 responses obtained via an online survey conducted amongst executives of services firms in Australia.Findings – The findings show that possessing a strong service branding capability and co‐opting customer involvement through customer empowerment in the marketing effort is essential for services firms to realize the potential value of market orientation. This is important if the firm wants to translate the understanding gained from market intelligence (via market orientation a...

Value creation architecture and engineering: A business model encompassing the firm‐customer dyad

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for a value creation business (VCB) model. It seeks to unlock two essential research questions: “what constitutes value”, and “how do firms create value for customers?” in the context of the firm‐customer dyad.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is conceptual and is premised on a review of the extant literature on value and value creation. It addresses the limitations pertaining to the dominance of the value‐in‐use perspective. It also addresses the call for a paradigm shift toward customer‐centric marketing and operant resource‐based dominant logic. Building on the review, the paper identifies essential components of value in value creation processes.Findings – The VCB model is developed by integrating three perspectives of value including creating value for customers, value‐in‐offering, and value‐in‐use, capturing a contingency approach to theory building. The model enlightens how value creation architecture (the strategic spac...

Marketing resource-capability complementarity and firm performance in B2B firms

Purpose – This study aims to examine how market orientation (MO), marketing resources and marketing resource deployment are related and impact business-to-business (B2B) firm- and customer-level performance. Design/methodology/approach – A self-administrated questionnaire was used to collect data from 251 firms out of a sample of 1000 B2B firms selected from a database of businesses. Findings – Marketing resources and marketing capability are complementary in contributing to both firm and customer performance. In addition, they are partial mediators of the relationship between MO and firm- and customer-level performance. Only marketing resources fully mediate the relationship between MO and firm-level performance. Research limitations/implications – This study relied on self-reporting by marketing executives, thus inferences about causality should be made with caution. Specifically, the time sequence of the relationships among resource possession and resource deployment and marketing results is not easily...

Examining Drivers Of Collaborative Inbound Open Innovation: Empirical Evidence From Australian Firms

Knowledge-based competition is leading to collaboration with partners and even competitors as firms pursue appropriate knowledge for innovation which has become a strategic imperative. Inbound open innovation helps increase the innovativeness of the firm by monitoring the operating environment and enabling it to source knowledge from collaborative partners. On the basis of in-depth interviews with senior managers and the knowledge-based view of the firm, this study examines the extent to which inbound open innovation activities contribute to collaborative innovation. Then, using a sample of 224 surveys representative of a cross-section of medium to large firms involved in collaborative ventures, the theoretical model is empirically examined. The results show that collaborative creativity, learning and knowledge stock are critical core inputs of collaborative innovation, with the support of formal coordination mechanisms and internal search processes, such as structural centralisation, formality and absorptive capacity.

Examining the marketing planning–marketing capability interface and customer-centric performance in SMEs

Managers face a constant challenge to develop specific capabilities that will assist them to deploy resources which provide positional advantages in an effort to achieve superior financial or customer performance. To address mechanisms to provide solutions for these challenges, this study examines the relationships between marketing planning capability, marketing mix implementation capability, market orientation (MO) and customer-centric performance. The contention is raised and supported that firm resource–capability co-alignment drives towards superiority in customer-centric performance. The results of a survey of senior executives from firms in Australia show that marketing planning capability and MO improve marketing implementation capability, which in turn fosters customer-centric performance (customer attraction and customer retention). In particular, while MO and marketing planning capability do impact marketing mix implementation capability, marketing planning capability does so more significantly than MO. The contribution of this study is in examining marketing across three main domains: marketing as culture; strategy; and tactics in SMEs in Australia.

The relationship between business orientations and brand performance: A cross‐national perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to adopt a customer‐centric value creation perspective to provide insights into the contribution of business orientations, especially marketing orientation and innovation orientation to the creation of customer‐centric value (customer equity and brand performance).Design/methodology/approach – To undertake this examination, a model was developed and then tested to validate its applicability in the context of both developed and developing economies. The paper includes partial least squares.Findings – The findings demonstrate that being marketing‐oriented and innovation‐oriented appears to be important in creating customers, keeping them, and increasing add‐on selling to them and rewards the firm with greater brand performance in the marketplace. Importantly, these relationships are universally held across developed and developing business environments. Interestingly, marketing orientation was found to contribute more to the creation of customer‐centric value than inno...

The contingent value of marketing and social networking capabilities in firm performance

Recent research shows a continued interest by scholars in understanding the extent that firms develop and deploy marketing capability in an effort to enhance their market- and financial-based performance. In conjunction with the marketing literature, relational governance scholars suggest that social networks can provide access resources and knowledge required to perform business activities which assist in achieving performance objectives. Yet, the literature is almost silent about the extent that social networks assist market-oriented firms in their efforts to develop superior marketing capability to enhance performance. The findings from a survey of 160 firms in an emerging Middle Eastern economy show that market-oriented firms are better at developing and deploying marketing capability when the levels of business, political, and academic ties are high.