Research, Theories And Methods To Build Competitive Advantage Based On Customer Value

With the economic globalization, quick information proliferation and shortening of product life cycle, enterprises all over the world have paid great attention to the shortage of competitive advantage.There are at least three perspectives of competitive advantage research. They are customer perspective, enterprises resources perspective and competitor perspective. This paper starts from the customer perspective stressed by Michael Porter and Robert Woodruff, introduces the customer value concept, generalizes and refines the customer value characteristics, and demonstrates that customer value is the most important source of competitive advantage. With the help of existent research findings, this paper brings up a set of process methods, techniques and tools to develop customer value based competitive strategy.This paper includes five chapters. In the first chapter, from the historical view, the paper retrospects the practice and research findings of how enterprises obtain competitive advantage since the last century, proposes the three-perspective model of competitive advantage research, demonstrates the view that customer perspective is the most fundamental and most important of them and that other perspectives can be integrated with the help of customer perspective, thus concludes with the proposition that customer value is the most important source of competitive advantage in the 21st century.In the second chapter, the paper dedicates to the customer value concept. The paper incorporates this chapter simply because there are many disagreements on the customer value concept. Based on literature review, this paper divides the customer value definitions into five schools, refines the customer value characteristics of each school, and proposes this paper's customer value definition and its extended definition.Though Porter and Woodruff have long ago proposed the view that customer value is the source of competitive advantage, researches still regards customer value as one prerequisite to competitive advantage, and there are no empirical researches on the relationship between them. Therefore, in the third chapter, this paper first builds the logic to demonstrate the relationship, then demonstrates that customer value is the most important antecedent to competitive advantage with the help of existent research findings and empirical researches by the author.In the fourth and fifth chapter, the paper focuses on how to develop the processes,methods and tools of customer value based competitive strategy. The fourth chapter proposes the process of customer value based competitive strategy development and introduces the customer value exploration and measurement scale as well as related analysis and statistics techniques. Based on the empirical research findings, this paper develops the DEVAL scale. The fifth chapter bases on this scale, uses Woodruff's method, combines one enterprise-consulting program and finally proposes the method to develop customer value based competitive strategy.This paper's theoretical meanings are as follows. First, this paper sorts over the existent customer value definitions, generalizes the characteristics of customer value, and proposes a more precise definition of customer value. Second, empirical researches demonstrate that customer value is the most important antecedent to competitive advantage, and pave the way for the customer value and competitive advantage theory development. This paper's practical meaning is that a set of principles, processes, methods and tools has been developed with the help of existent research findings. It will produce large application value for enterprises to face competitions and formulate strategies.