Btob Relationship Quality Of Supplier Relations Function

Competition between modern firms becomes more severity, it is not only on the quality and service of products any longer, but also on the conformity of supply chain and resource. Once customers hold the important resources and key suppliers, or suppliers have their own faithful customers, these firms can gradely enhance their competence advantage. So to firms, improving the relationship quality between suppliers and customers becomes one of the priorities of some marketing theory researchers in the recent years.In the relationship quality between customers and suppliers (BtoB), how to scale the relationship quality becomes a key issue. In the past research, many scholars rise their own points of how to scale relationship quality, some scholars suggest relationship quality should contain trust and commitment, others think it should add satisfaction and conflict to the dimension of relationship quality and so on. In this dissertation, on the basis of forerunners' research, we use trust, commitment, satisfaction, conflict for scaling relationship quality between customers and suppliers.However, knowing how to scale relationship quality is not enough, we should also know how to influence relationship quality, and suppliers and customers should know what to do to rise the relationship quality between them. In this dissertation, on the basis of forerunners' research, we express means of rising the relationship quality from relationship function. Forerunners have already done much research on relationship value which suppliers and customers create, but they have done little about relationship function. So in this dissertation, we combine relationship value and function, and distinguish the range of relationship function of suppliers and customers. Especially we use the relationship function of suppliers for this dissertation's emphases, and we also used it for the influence factors of relationship quality of BtoB. Moreover, there are many different relationship situation of BtoB, we use some indexes of forerunners for classifying the relationship situation. Through empirical study, we see how the relationship function of suppliers performs in different relationship situation and how they influence relationship quality between them. Finally we get the strategy which suppliers and customers should act in different relationship situation.The content of this research includes three parts. Firstly, based on the formerly researches we put forward the construct system of how suppliers' relationship function influence relationship quality between them. Secondly, we summarize the index of classifying relationship situation through literature review about relationship situation, so we can do the empirical study. Thirdly, we make empirical study about how suppliers' relationship function influence relationship quality, we also analyze other controlling factors influencing the relationship such as scale, character of suppliers and relationship time.