Date of Award
1992
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Abstract
Partnering has been described as one of the most profound changes to hit the American industrial marketplace in five decades. From a marketing perspective, it is critical to determine what makes a supplier attractive to a customer for a partnering relationship, before the customer decides to establish such relationships with its vendors. Suppliers who are winners in this new environment will have a strategic advantage over their competition; those who lose could seriously restrict their possibility of future growth.;Drawing on organizational buying behavior theory and channel relationship theory, a comprehensive causal model of antecedent constructs to partnering attractiveness was developed. Data were gathered from a cross-section of purchasing people across southwestern Ontario involved in the purchasing of stationery and office supplies, and welding supplies and equipment. Model parameters were estimated by Partial Least Squares (PLS), a regression-based causal modelling methodology developed by Herman Wold.;The model was able to explain 43% of the variance in partnering attractiveness with the data from stationery supplies purchasers, and 36% with the data from welding supplies purchasers. With both sets of data, a reduced model restricted to those constructs from channel relationship theory was able to predict partnering attractiveness as well as the full model. With both sets of data, a reduced model restricted to those constructs from organizational buying behavior theory accounted for a significantly lower percentage of variance explained in partnering attractiveness.;Additional constructs investigated in this research were satisfaction and trust, two causal antecedents to partnering attractiveness that are predicted within the same model. The moderating effects of relationship importance have also been investigated where the buyer-seller relationships have been designated as either primary relationships (between a buyer and the seller that supplies more of a particular product group to that buyer than any other seller) or secondary relationships (between a buyer and all other sellers for a particular product group).;The results of this research have implications for marketing theory, marketing management, and for research methodology.
Recommended Citation
MacKenzie, Herbert Fraser, "Partnering Attractiveness In Buyer-seller Relationships" (1992). Digitized Theses. 2135.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/2135