Authors: Lindsay Cheng; Pete Naude
The relationships between companies, and the complex network contexts within which they operate, lie at the very heart of the IMP Group’s understanding of how business-to-business markets operate. But an earlier and sometimes more fundamental question is often ignored: just how do companies generate these relationships and networks in the first place? This is clearly a resource-dependent activity, since the generation and follow-up of potential leads is an expensive and time-consuming managerial activity. In this paper we follow the activities of the managers in a small company operating in a high-technology segment of the engineering industry, in their attempts to generate extra business from the marketplace. We examine the extent to which the traditional approaches to b2b segmentation proved to be useful, and comment on an aspect that is too often ignored: having segmented a market, how should managers evaluate different segments? Keywords: Business-to-Business segmentation, multi-criteria decision making, judgmental modelling
Journal: ( – )
Web Address:
Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)