Searching for Relationship Value in Business Markets: Are We Missing Something?

There is considerable evidence that in business markets relationships matter. Firms tend to depend on a limited number of relationships to customers and suppliers. Coping in these involves costs but relationships can result in significant benefits. That has lead to the great effort recently put by scholars in conceptualizing and assessing the "value" of business relationships. Yet, the conceptualizations of relationship value remain elusive and their impact on the practice has only been limited.In this paper we return to the concept of relationship value. We report results from a longitudinal study of value perceptions by customer and suppliers in the ICT Security market. On bases of this we argue that desired value and value judgments by the parties involved are subjective, relative, context dependent and changing as interaction between the parties unfolds and their context perceptions evolve. Consequently we argue that value of relationships is phenomenological and therefore the main factor of the desired and perceived relationship value is the cognitive/affective elaboration by the parties involved rather than the actual characteristics of the relationships and their content.