VALUE CREATION IN FARMER-DRIVEN MARKETING CHANNELS: THE CASE OF MURRELLEN PORK

Successful value creation requires not only exploiting productivity gaps but also pursuing the opportunity gaps that technological innovation and changing customer preferences provide. However, the pursuit of opportunity gaps requires firms to refocus their energies toward developing new, innovative, and flexible marketing processes and architectures in which the necessary skills, resources, and core competencies, whether within or outside the firm’'s boundaries, can be combined. The establishment of flexible modular architectures is not a trivial task; it requires an understanding of the critical processes and constraints driving innovation within a chain. The adoption of modular architectures can provide opportunities to create greater product variety, introduce technologically improved products, bring products to market more quickly, and undertake initiatives more easily than before. This paper applied a conceptual framework developed in Gow et al. (2002) to explain how livestock producers can exploit opportunity-gap initiatives through the development and use of flexible and modular chain architectures. The case of a New Zealand pork producer who restructured his farming operation to match consumer requirements provides empirical support.