Title Slide Speech: The title of research paper is “Why Do Customers Get More Than They Need?
How Organizational Culture Shapes Product Capability Decisions”. We are
presenting this research paper to give you an overview about current
exploration in this area of research. We will identify certain strengths and
weaknesses of this research paper and will also present the research gap we can
fill ourselves. This research paper was published in Journal of Marketing in
January, 2013. The central idea of this study demonstrates how a supplier
firm's organizational culture can cause overshooting scenarios and how these
effects can be attenuated to the extent that the focal firm's basic values also
reflect a customer orientation.
Summary – Slide 1
The studies
on product management are based on two main premises. i.e. product's capability
(ultimately made by customers) and supplier's decision (to provide a particular
level of product capability to customers)
Casual
industry observation elaborate marketing practices that deviate from these
premises, mostly products that are capable of "too little” are considered
as under provision, while products that are capable of "too much” are
considered as overprovision and OVERSHOT customers who consume a product but
are not pleased, and even frustrated, with what it offers to them because the
capabilities provided are in excess of their needs, which is outcome of
overprovision.
Authors
utilized Competing Value frame work having 4 cultures, expecting Adhocracy and
market culture promote product overprovision and Bureaucracy and Clan culture
promote product under provision.
They argue
that whether the overprovision potential of an adhocracy and market culture
actually manifests itself in the form of overshot customers depends on whether
restraints exist that prevent mismatches with customers' needs. They also
propose that such restraints reside in other aspects of a firm's culture, namely,
in its customer. If a firm's customer orientation is sufficiently strong, it
may:
- Attenuate the general tendency of adhocracy and market cultures to overprovide
- Help ensure that these CVF cultures' relevant values are adapted so that capability levels are consistent with customer needs.
Hence,
Authors expect the level of product capability that is ultimately offered to a
customer to depend on the interactions between certain CVF cultures and the
firm's customer orientation.
Summary – Slide 2
Author made
three specific contributions to the literature. As, previous research (e.g.,
Christensen 1997) documented the phenomenon of overprovision and described the
difficulties overprovision causes for customers.
Authors in
this paper showed
- How certain aspects of a supplier firm may create such problems in the first place by simply demonstrating the existence of overprovision, suggesting its unique antecedents.
- CVF cultures possess distinct "dark sides," which have the potential to compromise customer outcomes. The relevant cultural influences are important for marketers to understand not only because of the effect they can have on customers but also because firms may promote their emergence in the first place.
- Focus on customer orientation by showing that its particular values may play an even greater role within a company than commonly assumed.
On the
other hands, author explained certain theoretical arguments in this research
study. A general theoretical argument is that the level of a product's
capability is affected by a supplier's organizational culture, or "the
pattern of shared values and beliefs that help individuals understand
organizational functioning and thus provide them with the norms for behaviour
in the organization". Another argument is that two particular CVF cultures
i.e. adhocracy and market are associated with overprovision tendencies. Unlike
bureaucracy and clan cultures, which share an internal focus on efficiency
through integration, adhocracy and market cultures share an external focus on
competitive positioning through differentiation.
Summary – Slide 3
Left
The empirical context used in this study is “IT industry,
and qualitative data is collected using two different questionnaires, one for
suppliers and another for customers. Data was collected from 317 suppliers and
105 customers. Certain statistical models were used to evaluate data are
Partial disaggregation model, factor mode and nested tests etc.
Evaluation of
Statistical used in Article – Slide 3 Right
Authors performed multicollinearity diagnostic tests for our
independent variables.), they computed conditioning statistics for the full
model, including interactions and control variables, with all indexes remaining
below the threshold of 30. Hypotheses of
article involved the determinants of deviation (in the form of overprovision)
from a particular customer's product need, they tested the hypotheses with a
Tobit I model. For control purposes, the model accounts for the other two CVF
cultures (bureaucracy and clan) and their interactions with customer
orientation, as well as a supplier's reputation and product experience. They
split the sample at the midpoint of the dependent variable, and subsequently
modelled the extent of overprovision.
Results indicated that, a customer orientation only attenuates the
overprovision tendency of an adhocracy culture.
Strengths – Slide 4
Authors believed that demonstrating product-culture links in
a domain in which the focal decisions usually involve fixed investments on the
part of a supplier (Jackson 1985) represents a strong test of their theory.
These variations in the provision of capability are even more likely in pure
service domains, in which capability levels can be easily varied upward or
downward by suppliers.
The longitudinal investigations of the relationship between
capability provision and strategic positioning. Possibly, trade-offs may exist
in a CVF culture (e.g., market culture) support firm-level strategic objectives
(e.g., developing a reputation for being a supplier of well-engineered
products).
Also, authors were successful in finding out their expected
result that a customer orientation did play the predicted alignment role in
certain types of CVF cultures.
Weakness – Slide 5
A major weakness of this study is that, authors limited
their study to only one particular marketing domain, namely, decisions about
actual products. However, authors believe that there are some advantages
associated with restricting the scope of the study in terms of fixed investment
on the part of supplier.
Also, authors failed to elaborate consistent findings
regarding customer orientation that did not significantly affect a firm's
product-capability decisions in its own right. On the face of it, this finding
appears inconsistent with the market orientation literature.
On the other hands, author mentioned in limitations of study
that longitudinal investigations of the relationship between capability
provision and strategic positioning. Possibly, trade-offs may exist in that a
CVF culture (e.g., market culture) may have undesirable consequences at the
individual customer level (i.e., in the form of overshooting, which is another
main weakness of this paper.
Area of Improvement –
Slide 6
Authors have successfully answered the arguments in their
study, but still there is a research gap which gives us opportunity to extend
this area of research into more improved form.
We can make possible extension in a service context that
variations in the provision of capability are even more likely in pure service
domains, in which capability levels can be easily varied upward or downward by
supplier. Also, we can shed additional light on the specific role that a
customer orientation plays with respect to a firm's product decisions,
especially decisions on calibrating a product to particular capability levels.
Moreover, we
can also augment results of this article by considering customer satisfaction
and loyalty. And, we can identify asymmetric effects of overprovision and
underprovision on customer satisfaction.
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