of companies in the supply network – ‘complementors’. Most businesses would find
their lives more difficult if it were not for ‘ complementors ’ – other businesses providing complementary services and products (for example, internet retailers depend
on ‘order fulfilment’ delivery companies). Figure 5.3 illustrates the ‘value net’ for a
company. It sees any company as being surrounded by four types of players: suppliers, customers, competitors and complementors.
Complementors enable customers to value your product or service more when
they have their product and service as opposed to when they have yours alone.
Competitors are the opposite; they make customers value your product or service
less when they can have their product or service, rather than yours alone. Also,
competitors can be complementors and vice versa. For example, adjacent restaurants
may see themselves as competitors for customers’ business. A customer standing
outside and wanting a meal will choose between the two of them. Yet in another
way they are complementors. Would that customer have come to this part of town
unless there was more than one restaurant for him or her to choose between?
Restaurants, theatres, art galleries, and tourist attractions generally, all cluster
together in a form of cooperation to increase the total size of their joint market. It
is important to distinguish between the way companies cooperate in increasing the
total size of a market and the way in which they then compete for a share of that
market. Historically, insufficient emphasis has been put on the role of the supplier.
Harnessing the value of suppliers is just as important as listening to the needs of
customers. Destroying value in a supplier in order to create it in a customer does
not increase the value of the network as a whole. For example, pressurising suppliers because customers are pressurising you will not add long-term value. In the long
term it creates value for the total network to find ways of increasing value for suppliers as well as customers. All the players in the network, whether they be customers,
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