A Study On Consumer-Orientation Strategy Based On Resource-Based View

Consumers are the main part of the market. They vote with money to determine the value of product and to decide the survival of firms. It has become a key to achieve competitive advantage whether firms can make influence on consumers effectively. Nowadays the competition has become fiercer. That consumption shows the characteristics of complexity and refinement requires that consumers have better abilities to consume the products. The products will be worthless if they are not accepted by consumers. The performance of firm is directly affected by the extent to which products can creation value for consumers to gain consumer recognition. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze how a firm makes strategy to get more comprehensive competitive advantage based on consumers.By a literature review of strategic management theory and an analysis on the practice of strategy and marketing nowadays, the paper finds strategic management research lack of consumer perspective and the practical needs for consumer- oriented strategy. Thus, this paper gives a consumer-orientation strategy analytical framework based on resource-based view to study how firms take advantage of resource and capability inside firms and resources in the demand side to get competitive advantage.First of all, the study gives a value system in which the consumer is the key to conduct and measure value. Value creation is expanded to a process including firm input and consumer output. I discuss the rationale that value is created, conducted and captured. Different form strategy positioning and those RBV research focusing on supply side; this paper focuses on the demand side. This paper suggests a new strategy that the firms manage the resource in demand side to influence value creation and value capture in order to attain sustainable competitive advantage. This study brings consumer into RBV analytical framework. The category of resource is expanded. It is pointed out that the firm can have competitive advantage by possessing the resource in consumer side directly or indirectly. A consumer perceived benefit creation function which has two key factors called value perceiving capability and resource input is proposed by a synthesis of marketing thinking and production function of value. The value creation principle is also analyzed based on consumer itself. The resources are divided into two types called resource related to leverage and resource related to cost based on the role resources play in value creation process. Then the characteristic of resources is discussed in the new perspective. The rationale of consumer-oriented strategic alliances based on resource is studied. Finally, this study makes an empirical analysis by case study with the theory and framework suggested in the paper above.