دانلود رایگان مقاله چه زمانی خدمات یک استراتژی رقابتی سودآور است؟

abstract

Although servitization has emerged as a new competitive strategy for manufacturers, there has been little research about product-level servitization. We investigate the competition between two channels, one separately providing both goods and services and the other providing inseparable servitized goods through a game theoretic approach. Two critical parameters to understand competition between the two channels will be proposed: (1) service dependency – a degree of dependency of physical goods upon services – and (2) channel substitutability – a degree of substitution between conventional channels and servitized one. The study reveals that the servitization strategy is a better choice for a manufacturer selling physical goods only when the goods require a higher level of service (i.e., high service dependency), and when the competition between the two channels is more severe (i.e., high channel substitutability). In addition, obtaining cost efficiency is found to be an important factor to achieve higher competitive advantage over the other channel.

5. Conclusion

The proposed model examines competition between a conventional channel where physical goods and services are separately provided and a newly introduced channel where servitized products are offered by a single firm while service dependency and channel substitutability change. The impacts of the two variables on the channel performance and relationship are explored. The results of our study enable practitioners to identify the strategic implications of their own service composition and channel characteristics with respect to the servitization strategy. This paper has a twofold contribution. First, it presents an analytical model of channel competition considering a product-level servitization strategy, which is the first attempt in the literature to the best of our knowledge. In the servitization literature, empirical research has been done in many aspects, but an analytical comparative approach has not been employed. Second, practitioners and researchers can find some critical conditions that make servitization strategy a viable one. According to the magnitude of service dependency and channel substitutability, managers can determine an appropriate servitization strategy to maximize the firm's profit. Under high channel substitutability for instances, managers in a manufacturer should consider servitization to increase the firm's profit since customers can more easily realize the value of servitized products and switch to the newly offered servitized product. This research has several limitations that suggest future research agenda. First, we do not consider other characteristics of services except price and quality. However, there exist various aspects of services in reality that may provide interesting implications on the servitization strategy. Identifying such characteristics of services and analyzing their implications would be a fruitful area to more thoroughly understand the servitization phenomenon. Second, it is assumed that the market base for goods is larger than that of servitized products, and that the sum of the two is fixed in this study. However, these assumptions can be relaxed to incorporate any endogeneity in reality. For example, more manufacturers' strategic moves to servitization may change the size of the market base for the conventional and/or the servitized channel. Examining this issue will be also an interesting research avenue in future studies. Third, since the current study does not incorporate any cost structure of goods production and service provision, future research can also investigate whether a firm- or industry-specific cost structure would generate different implications for the servitization strategy.