Exploring customer perceived relationship value : findings of qualitative research of business-to-business relationships

With the increasing interest in business relationship issues, relationship value has emerged as an important aspect. What makes a business relationship valuable for the standpoint of the customer has become critical for supplier. The present paper reviews the alternative conceptualizations and measurement approaches of relationship value proposed in the literature of business-to-business marketing, and discusses that the existing measures are inadequate as the nature of value drivers and the mechanism of value creation is not addressed in-depth. There is a need to further research the concept of business relationship value to investigate its nature and how it is created, and to develop empirically grounded measures. Indepth interviews with purchasing managers identified nine drivers of relationship value in business-to-business relationships. Drawing on the literature of social psychology and findings of the qualitative research, the present paper suggests a conceptualization of relationship value based on ?relative weighting? of the relationship attributes. The paper concludes with implications for the measurement of customer perceived business relationship value.