Creating superior value through network offerings

This paper draws on the experiences of project marketing and solution selling to improve the understanding of how to create superior value for customers. Project marketing and solution selling have both developed approaches to deal with complex marketing situations for a number of years now. The upstream mobilization of customer network actors and the downstream enlargement of the content and scope of the offering are the key features of these approaches. This paper presents two case studies to focus attention on elements that are crucial to this twin-track approach. The downstream extension of the offering relies on services supporting the customer's action (SSC), which supplement traditional services that support the supplier's product (SSP). The upstream extension leads to an introduction to other types of services or elements of the offering – the services supporting the customer's network actors (SSCN). Furthermore, the paper proposes a marketing process that takes the supplier's viewpoint, for whom the entire approach is a network mobilization, into account. This approach to the offering, which included SSP, SSC, and SSCN, is typical of a network strategy in which the supplier recruits and enrolls new actors to (re)model the buying center. This marketing process is in tune with the latest developments of the service-dominant (S-D) logic, as it proposes a move from the value chain toward a value-creation network/constellation. Consequently, creating superior value for customer means mobilizing and servicing actors far beyond the boundaries of the buying center, supply chain, and customer solution net.