Knowing your suppliers: people or media as key sources of information?
- Most companies have realized the high importance of becoming the preferred customers of their suppliers to obtain preferential resource allocation. However, they cannot evaluate their own customer attractiveness properly. In order to make the assessment of the own customer status possible, this paper analyzes the impact of several information sources on the preferred customer status knowledge, supplier satisfaction knowledge and knowledge of alternative supplier relationships with other customers. Testing these hypotheses on a sample of 624 pur-chasers, we show that people provide more relevant information on the company’s strategic positioning than media. In particular, the suppliers, competitors and other actors are very im-portant information sources. Following our findings, purchasers should adopt their activities in order to better anticipate their suppliers’ intention and the customer treatment that they can expect from their suppliers.
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