Paper info

Behind the scene -The mechanisms of dynamic capabilities for customer value creation

Sarah Serbin Wikner

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

Today's worldwide economic turmoil stresses the need for better understanding customer value creation. Customer value in B2B is usually studied at a company level through the offering or relationships. Little has been done to understand what creates value at the micro level. The aim with this study is to understand how suppliers in a B2B context create customer value in their daily activities and routines. More precisely, this study focuses on marketing activities that underpin and create customer value. I will thus both draw upon the strategy as practice view and dynamic capabilities in order to unravel the mechanisms of customer value creation at a micro- level and make sense of it on a company-level. The empirical material collection is part of my doctoral thesis. It consists of in-depth interviews conducted at Combitech and a set of customers of this firm as well as observations at Combitech. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First it links routines and their effects on the offering and thus increases the manageability of the customer value concept. Second, it relates the different theoretical approaches on customer value to one another and results in a more comprehensive understanding of the concept.