Paper info

Do you know me? (Do you love me??). Some empirical findings of the Hungarian chemical buyers behaviour

Judit Simon , László SAJTOS and Tibor MANDJAK

The paper was published at the 17th IMP-conference in Oslo, Norway in 2001.

Summarising more than twenty year's business marketing literature Reid and Plank (2000)have found organisational buying behaviour (OBB) as a most frequently researched area inour discipline. Referring to Scott and Webster (1991) they state that conceptual developmenthas been paramount in the OBB field while empirical testing has not. Emphasising theusefulness of existing models and constructs the authors conclude with the importance ofvalue in the understanding of OBB. In this spirit they have formulated several further researchquestions. They propose research on "how can knowledge of a company's value orientation beused to construct a value proposition by the marketer?" (Reid and Plank 2000 p.55).In an interactive buyer-seller relationship (Hakansson 1982, Turnbull and Valla 1986, Ford1990) the buyer's value orientation could be expressed by his expectations about the exchange(or episodes) or more generally about the business relationship with the supplier. The buyer'sbehaviour could be very different in a business relationship depending on his transactional orrelationship orientation (Jackson 1985, Webster 1992). In this sense the buyer valueorientation may be characterised by his expectations about the supplier. He needs a moretransactional or a more relationship approach from his partner. To give satisfaction to thebuyer, to create value for him, means to fulfil and to form his expectations and his needs in aninteractive (business) relationship. As value creation is a cornerstone of business marketing(Anderson and Narus 1999) and a business relationship always means an investment and acertain level of adaptation (Turnbull at al. 1996) in other words it is a resource allocation, toknow the buyer's (value) orientation is a fundamental question for the supplier. In thedifferent buyers' orientations the suppliers are obliged to present different market offerings(Anderson and Narus 1999). But do we really know our buyers?In our paper we present the different behaviours of Hungarian chemical buyers. Based on 78standardised questionnaires we analyse the buyer's transaction or relationship orientation. Weare looking for differences in the buyer's preferences about the product exchange episodes andhis expectations about their relationships with the suppliers. We consider the productexchange preferences as a buyer's perception of episode value, and his requirements about thesupplier's activity as a perception of the relationship value (Mandják and Durrieu 2000).Our empirical findings show that Hungarian chemical buyers' behaviour are quiteheterogeneous, as Anderson and Narus (1999) criticise the tunnel vision of commoditymarkets, and the differences in the value orientation of these buyers could be the basis of aneventual segmentation of this market.