Customer Concentration,specificity Investment And Enterprise Performance

With the putting forwarding of “Made-in-China 2025” strategy and the booming development of Internet,how to create better living and developing conditions and get strong competitive advantages to become the goal of each manufacturing enterprise,which will also lay a solid foundation for China to change from a “Huge manufacturing country” to a “Powerful manufacturing country”.With the fierce global competition and the growing development of Internet,the competition between enterprises has gradually evolved into the competition between supply chains.In order to better face fierce competition and uncertain environment,only enterprises strengthen cooperation with customers and maintain long-term cooperative relations can they keep healthy and long-time development of themselves.The existing literature on customer relationship and firm performance,or theoretically analyze the influence of the customer's bargaining power on firm's performance,or empirically test the economic effect of customer concentration,but not yet explore the internal reasons of their correlations from a deep level.Customer concentration is one of reflections of customers' characteristics,the customer relationship life cycle describes the dynamics changes of customer relationship.How does the customer relationship life cycle affect the relationship between customer concentration and enterprise performance? Specificity investment is a necessary condition for maintaining customer trade relationships,how does the firm's customer concentration and specificity investment dynamically change with the customer relationship life cycle? What's the affecting mechanism or approach of customer concentration on firm performance? These problems of this paper have important significance.This paper tests the effect of customer concentration and specificity investment on enterprise performance from the view of customer relationship life cycle,and further explores the intermediary role of specificity investment in customer concentration and enterprise performance.The findings show that :(1)The higher the customer concentration is,the stronger the bargaining power of the customer and the worse enterprise performance will be,and while customer concentration and enterprise performance appearing a positive U-type relationship graph.(2)The customer-concentration is significantly negatively correlated with specificity investment,presenting a positive U-type relationship graph with high left side and low right side.(3)As the relationship matures,the negative relationship between customer concentration and firm performance is improved,and the negative effect between customer concentration and specificity investment is weakened.(4)Customer concentration affects enterprise performance through specificity investment.That is,specificity investment has part intermediary effect on the relationship between the above two.The conclusions of the study has some practical significance for the business managers about customer relationship management.