Business Market Management:
Understanding, Creating, and Delivering Value
by James C. Anderson and James A. Narus
I'm going to give my first review of business textbook written by James C. Anderson and James A. Narus: Business Market Management: Understanding, Creating and Delivering Value (Prentice Hall, 1999). This is, however, a textbook with a difference (and not just that it costs $80). Narus and Anderson have been studying business-to-business marketing for the last 15 years, and what you have here is 400 pages of how excellent firms understand, market, and deliver value to their business customers. Over the last decade and a half, Narus and Anderson have published sections of their work in Harvard Business Review (three essays), the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, and in other prestigious business publications. I've been waiting for this book for years.
In their introduction, Narus and Anderson state that there was a great need for a book on business marketing that:
- has value as its cornerstone
- focuses on business market processes for understanding, creating, and delivering value
- stresses doing business across borders, and
- accentuates working relationships and business networks.
The book's strength, though it is specific, presents a challenge to all but the most dedicated business reader. This book is as dense as it is rich in examples. I underlined so much of it that the whole point of underlining was lost. But I have returned to it again and again for its suggestions, methodologies, and examples. It bears many rereadings.
So I'll provide still another first: providing reading strategies for a reviewed book. Start with two HBR articles. In January/February 1995, they published "Capturing the Value of Supplementary Services." This essay makes a compelling--and, with the aid of the HBR editors, a more readable--case that suppliers have to know how much value-added services cost to provide and they need to make sure these services are offered only to those customers whose contribution justifies them. Business Marketing: Understand What Customers Value, HBR, November-December 1998, deals with methods for determining what customers value and how smart suppliers are quantifying the value delivered to customers. Our experience has been that, if the supplier does not quantify value, the customer will fixate on what is quantified-the price-and nibble the supplier's margin until it-and the supplier-disappear.
A second reading strategy. The book has 10 chapters, each 40+ pages. I recommend reading the Introduction and the individual chapter headings and the detailed (and excellent) summaries at the end of each chapter. These will tell you if the chapter is worth your time (not every reader will need to read the chapter on sustaining reseller relationships, for example). I also suggest reading the final chapter, "Sustaining Customer Relationships," because it's the best thing on relationship marketing I have seen for a long while. This book provides a level of value commensurate to the effort you are willing to expend in its reading.
Business readers will find chapters more applicable to their market situation. While I enjoyed and reread (in this case the highest form of love) the chapter on Sustaining Customer Relationships, I particularly liked the chapter called Managing Market Offerings, because it develops the argument of the HBR article on Capturing the Value of Supplementary Services. It does so by giving examples of how world-class suppliers determine and use base levels of services (what Narus and Anderson call "naked solutions") valued by all members of a segment. They then show how those suppliers augment that offering for strategic customers and how they charge for or unbundle services for smaller firms. They argue that all customers are not created equal; neither should their offerings be.
So I give this book my highest rating (one thumb up) and suggest you learn something of what Narus and Anderson have learned in 15 years of applied research. While I think this is a great textbook, I think the readers who will benefit most are not in academia but out in the field looking for ways to gain sustainable competitive advantage.
A caution: because the book is a text, your bookstore is probably not going to carry it. Our bookstore's distributor had one copy, which we snapped up as a second reading copy. Your bookstore or Amazon will order it from the publisher (it's now in a second edition), or you can call Prentice-Hall direct.
Reviewed by S4 Consulting
© S4 Consulting
