Information and Technology Management (ITM): Competitive Advantage through Customer Relationship: The Case of an Automobile Dealership

Information and Technology Management (ITM): Competitive Advantage through Customer Relationship: The Case of an Automobile Dealership

Marjorie Luísa Biehl (Unisinos University, Brazil), Brandon Link (Unisinos University, Brazil), Adolfo Alberto Vanti (Unisinos University, Brazil) and Gustavo Schneider (Unisinos University, Brazil)
Copyright: © 2011 |Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-463-9.ch013

Abstract

A competitive market gives the organizations a constant update on the management process of their businesses and allows the creation of new ways to take competitive advantage. Retail businesses need to identify the value perceived by customers as a strategic source of value generation. This chapter presented a competitive value generation methodology by identifying the most important values perceived by customers of a Volkswagen Car Dealer. There was application and analysis of two strategic instruments of research, a qualitative and another qualitative/quantitative one. As a result, the study obtained a proposal for value generation by setting the following strategic variables referent credibility/reliability.
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Introduction

Strategic management is constantly passing through changes in order to attend to new demands related to the uncertainties the market has been imposing. This way, the present treatise approaches such uncertainties – both quantitatively and qualitatively – which encase the strategy of a company within customer relationship and competitive value generation, through a model based on Compensatory Fuzzy Logic (CFL) that frames up mathematically the classical SWOT analysis, added of Objectives and Actions (SWOT-OA). This framework based on CFL is translated in Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, Objectives and Actions, which turns the linguistically-expressed knowledge of specialists into a widening-associative quantification of the Boolean logic, allowing the researchers and readers of this study to analyze the importance of each of its strategic variables.

According to Mintzberg and Quinn (2001) the strategy is characterized as a corporate transformation process, subjected to usual fixing. Due to this diagnosis, it is important to establish connections between strategic integration links and advance into a predictability of their behaviour, for according to Bonabeau (2002), predicting the unpredictable depends a lot on emerging phenomena formed amid the interaction of different organizational levels. This kind of situation instigated the writing of the present treatise, i.e. taking in account situations that are not standards represented in the strategic planning, and for this reason the following question was defined: How is it possible to generate competitive value through costumer relationship in a car part-seller company?

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