Michael Kleinaltenkamp

• Dr. Dr. h.c.
• Professor Emeritus at Freie Universität Berlin

In sectors across the experience economy—from live sports to festivals, nightlife entertainment, private members’ clubs, and invite-only events—firms compete by staging social atmospheres. When firms successfully stage social atmospheres, they benefit from enhanced customer experiences, loyalty, and place attachment. However, social atmospheres oft...

A well-crafted customer value proposition (CVP) is crucial to communicating the value that customers can expect from a product or service experience. Accordingly, researchers have become increasingly interested in how to shape CVPs to sell goods or services, especially in the business-to-business (B2B) context. This is particularly relevant for sub...

Resources are central to value creation processes. Hence, marketing and service research rely heavily on conceptualisations of resources and resource integration for theory building efforts. One of the most widely accepted marketing lenses on resources and resource integration is the service-dominant (S-D) logic. Depicting resources as becoming and...

As resources are central to value creation processes, marketing and service research rely heavily on conceptualizations of resources and their integration for theory building efforts. One of the most widely accepted lenses for resources and resource integration is the service-dominant (S-D) logic. Depicting resources as becoming and contextual, S-D...

In May 1993, Werner H. Engelhardt, Michael Kleinaltenkamp, and Martin Reckenfelderbäumer published the paper “Leistungsbündel als Absatzobjekte – Ein Ansatz zur Überwindung der Dichotomie von Sach- und Dienstleistungen” (Products as Bundles of Processes and Outcomes—An Approach to Overcome the Dichotomy between Goods and Services) in Schmalenbachs...

In this chapter, a goal-related perspective on CS and CSM is developed that builds the basis for this book. According to this view, customer success is when customers achieve their goals, and customer-perceived value represents the extent of a customer’s goal achievement. Based on this understanding, we distinguish between customer-perceived expect...

To make CSM work, i.e. to let the CSM Wheel spin, supplier firms have to implement the necessary internal CSM structures. Two aspects are crucial for this purpose. First, firms need to determine which goals to prioritize when implementing CSM. Second, they must decide how CSM will be embedded in the supplier’s organization. Within these decisions,...

Fulfilling the CVP lays the groundwork for future contract renewals. However, for repeat purchases and longer-term subscription arrangements, a CVP typically does not remain unchanged. In contrast, since customer goals likely change over time, a CVP needs to be adapted throughout a business relationship. Hence, embedding a CVP into a sales cycle ca...

Customer success can be achieved only if a solution is actually realized. Accordingly, this chapter shows how providers can help customers to do so by familiarizing them with related products and services, as well as installing and implementing them at the customer firm. This solution realization comprises thus two fields of activities: onboarding...

Selling a solution to a customer firm is the prerequisite for any activity of Customer Success Management. Consequently, in order to convince customers to buy a solution, suppliers have to apply activities of Value-Based Selling (VBS) first. At its core, VBS aims at crafting and communicating a Customer Value Proposition (CVP), based on a deep unde...

Customer success and customer success management are novel concepts that are of growing importance in business markets. The novelty of this management approach is that it does not focus on promising or selling value to a customer. Rather, customer success management aims to ensure that the promises of a customer value proposition are actually kept...

In business markets, customer value propositions are typically characterized by value that is not exchanged in the moment of purchase but rather cocreated by the supplier and the customer throughout the customer’s usage of a solution or complex offering. As suppliers typically aim at keeping the customer churn rate low, they need to make sure that...

Many marketing phenomena involve a group’s collective experiences; however, marketing research largely focuses on an individual’s experiences. This research argues that individual-level theorizing alone is inadequate to capture collective experiences, such as how families, teams, or business customers experience good and/or services. This article t...

Convincing new customers is challenging, especially when selling complex or subscription-based offerings. Here, customers often struggle to assess solutions’ quality due to solutions’ numerous and varied elements and their future-oriented nature. Therefore, prospective customers are not guaranteed that a solution promised in a CVP and the associate...

For CSM to have the desired effect for suppliers, namely a reduced churn rate, it must be considered valuable from customers’ perspective. Research studies have shown that customers assess their suppliers’ CSM activities with regard to the quality of the suppliers’ resources, e.g. the CS managers’ competencies, and the quality of the resource integ...

CSM does not come from nowhere. Rather there are drivers on both the customer and the supplier sides that push its development and implementation. In this chapter, we identify and explain the most important drivers of the implementation of CSM from customers’ and suppliers’ perspectives. They reach from common business practices, lacking or poor cu...

Dieses Buch beleuchtet zentrale Aspekte und Herausforderungen für Marketing und Innovation in disruptiven Zeiten. Die Digitalisierung und der Technologiefortschritt führen zu strukturellen Veränderungen bei den Marktparteien. So halten immer mehr technologische Innovationen Einzug in den Alltag der Kunden auf Konsum- und Businessmärkten, die deren...

Die zunehmende Digitalisierung und Datafizierung vieler Lebensbereiche hat im Marketing zu grundlegend neuen Möglichkeiten der Informationsgewinnung geführt. Waren diese Aktivitäten früher vor allem auf die Phase vor einem Kauf bzw. Verkauf ausgerichtet, bieten sich heute völlig neue Möglichkeiten, Daten direkt aus den kundenseitigen Nutzungsprozes...

Services are a part of our daily lives, so it is not surprising that artists have also taken up the phenomenon and reflected it in their works. This holds not only for popular music, in which artists approach service from the role of customers or front-line employees, but artists also use service as a metaphor to express their ideas and feelings. T...

Purpose COVID-19 has dramatically changed how people live, socialise and think about their future. The disruptive shock that hit societies all over the world had a significantly negative impact on businesses, creating not only economic discontinuity but also uncertainty and disorientation. This special issue on COVID-19 aims to phrase the pandemic...

Customer-perceived value is a key concept in inter-organizational relationships. As markets and business practices have evolved, there is growing need for an updated value conceptualization that acknowledges contemporary developments and reflects the state-of-the-art of research on business markets and inter-organizational relationships. The author...

In business markets, customer solutions are sometimes bought but only realized and used gradually or even not at all. As such, unrealized solutions typically require high customer and provider investments of money, time, and other resources, which may “fizzle out” after their full or partial implementation, lead to financial losses, exert negative...

Applications of customer success management are gaining increasing importance globally across industries. Especially when selling and delivering complex offerings, suppliers need to prove that value that has been promised in a value proposition is delivered to the customers or even exceeded in the post-purchase usage processes. This paper investiga...

“Market shaping”—the deliberate origination and propagation of valuable new resource linkages—describes how actors seek to steer markets into desirable directions. Yet, the exact nature of new resource linkages and how these emerge and disseminate remains unclear in extant literature. Addressing this gap, this research builds on the understanding t...

Effective research propositions are key to advancing marketing theory and practice. However, our discipline provides little guidance on how to systematically craft impactful propositions. Consequently, scholars often refrain from including propositions in conceptual articles due to either a lack of knowledge or the confidence to do so. This proves...

Fueled by technological advances, service delivery today is increasingly realized among multiple actors beyond dyadic service encounters. Customers, for example, often collaborate with peers, service employees, platform providers, or other actors in a service ecosystem to realize desired outcomes. Yet such multi-actor settings pose greater demands...

Purpose - Actor experience is a central concept in service-dominant (S-D) logic as value is always phenomenologically determined by a beneficiary. Due to the actor-to-actor (A2A) perspective, these beneficiaries can be individual (e.g., a customer) or collective actors (e.g., families, firms, nations). As phenomenology focuses on experiences of ind...

Although recent literature on market shaping highlights the importance of actors' engagement dispositions and behaviors and their interplay with institutional work, little is understood about the mechanisms that facilitate the institutionalization of engagement dispositions and behaviors within the market-shaping process. Beyond this backdrop, this...

In business-to-business markets, customer success management is gaining growing practical importance. The concept comprises customer-related activities that aim at monitoring, securing and enhancing customer success as well as the implementation of the corresponding organizational structures and processes within the supplier firm. In contrast to ex...

Ein erfolgreicher Anbieter gestaltet nicht nur ein Angebot, das aus Kundensicht ein gutes bzw. das beste Nutzen-Kosten-Verhältnis hat. Damit ein Anbieter erfolgreich sein kann, muss er auch dafür sorgen, dass der Kunde das Angebot kennt und davon überzeugt ist, dass es den anderen Alternativen überlegen ist. Schließlich muss der Anbieter auch für d...

Eine wesentliche Voraussetzung dafür, dass ein im Business-to-Business-Bereich (B2B) tätiges Anbieterunternehmen die strategischen und operativen Entscheidungen und Planungen seines Marketings umsetzen kann, ist das Vorhandensein einer entsprechenden Organisationstruktur und die Implementierung der notwendigen Abläufe. Im vorliegenden Kapitel werde...

Grundlage eines marktorientierten Marketingmanagements im B2B-Bereich ist ein Verständnis darüber, wie sich Kundenunternehmen bei der Beschaffung verhalten. Dieses Verhalten umfasst sowohl Aspekte des strategischen Beschaffungsmanagements der betreffenden Firmen als auch deren operativen Kaufverhaltens, die beide in dem vorliegenden Kapitel in ihre...

Business-to-Business-Marketing (B2B) umfasst strategische und operative Entscheidungen und Maßnahmen. Im vorliegenden Kapitel werden die strategischen Aspekte des B2B-Marketings dargestellt, die ausgehend von unternehmensstrategischen Festlegungen die Analyseschritte und Entscheidungstatbestände in Bezug auf die Wettbewerbs- sowie die Marketingstra...

Für die erfolgreiche Umsetzung aller Marketing-Aktivitäten im Business-to-Business-Bereich (B2B) ist neben der notwendigen Organisation auch ein entsprechendes Controlling der Aktivitäten notwendig. Dies umfasst neben der Kontrolle, ob und inwieweit die jeweiligen Ziele erreicht worden sind, die Koordination der Informationsversorgung der Entscheid...

Das vorliegende Kapitel behandelt vertiefend einige ausgewählte Spezialgebiete des Business-to-Business-Marketings (B2B). Im Einzelnen sind dies das Mehrstufige Marketing, das Auftrags- und Projektmanagement, das Geschäftsbeziehungsmanagement, das Internationale Marketing sowie das E-Business im B2B-Bereich.

In den entwickelten Volkswirtschaften stellen die Business-to-Business-Sektoren (B2B) die dominierenden Wirtschaftsbereiche dar. Sowohl im Produzierenden Gewerbe als auch im Dienstleistungsbereich werden weit über die Hälfte aller Umsätze mit Kunden erzielt, die selbst wiederum als Anbieter auf ihren Märkten tätig sind und dort Marketing betreiben....

Although the relationships among different dimensions of value creation, characteristics of dyadic relationships and value concepts are well studied, they have been conceptualized independently and without much linked theorizing. Hence, little is known about how these concepts and their effects interplay with each other. This article takes a config...

Das Buch liefert eine praxisorientierte Einführung in den Technischen Vertrieb sowie das Business-to-Business-Marketing. Es werden alle wichtigen Themen der Bereiche behandelt und die wichtigsten Konzepte und Methoden vorgestellt. Ziel ist es, Praktikern und Studierenden mit ingenieurswissenschaftlichem und anderem nicht-kaufmännischen Hintergrund...

Purpose-Firms transforming from a product supplier into a solution provider need to develop entirely new organizational capabilities or re-configure existing ones. This paper aims to conceptualize solution business fitness (SBF) as a construct that captures comprehensively the capabilities necessary for a firm to operate successfully in solution bu...

Purpose Firms transforming from a product supplier into a solution provider need to develop entirely new organizational capabilities or re-configure existing ones. This paper aims to conceptualize solution business fitness (SBF) as a construct that captures comprehensively the capabilities necessary for a firm to operate successfully in solution bu...

Customer solutions have been touted as the next service-growth engine. Yet, pursuing a solutions strategy can seriously backfire in times of severe crises. The massive economic shock wave brought on by the recent COVID-19 pandemic challenges some of the presumed advantages of business-to-business customer solutions and reveals downsides of these co...

Again and again, Helge Löbler has enriched Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic) with his inspiring and astute theorizing rooted in deep knowledge of philosophy and philosophy of science. With his interesting, creative, and often also unusual and provocative ideas, he has contributed significantly to the further development of the S-D Logic lens, enri...

Solutions in business markets aim to solve business customers' organizational problems by providing end-to-end offerings consisting of customized combinations of goods and services along the customers' business processes. While the effective integration of customer resources and processes is key for solution success, prior research predominantly fo...

Kommunikation ist der Prozess, durch den der Austausch von Gedanken und Bedeutungsinhalten zwischen Individuen oder zwischen Organisationen und Individuen ermöglicht wird. Marketing-Kommunikation umfasst dementsprechend alle Aktivitäten, durch welche die Beziehungen zwischen einem Anbieterunternehmen und seinen Kunden durch den Austausch von Inform...

Im vorliegenden Abschnitt werden die zentralen Konzepte und Planungsschritte bei der Entwicklung von Marketingstrategien abgegrenzt und charakterisiert. Hierzu gehören zunächst bestimmte Grundlagen der Marketingplanung: die Umwelt- und Branchenanalyse, die Situation des Unternehmens im Vergleich zu Wettbewerbern sowie bestimmte Leitlinien aus der U...

Marketing spielt heute nicht nur in fast allen mittleren und größeren Unternehmen eine wesentliche Rolle, sondern auch für zahlreiche Institutionen des öffentlichen Lebens (z. B. Kommunen, Museen oder auch Hochschulen). Die gewachsene Bedeutung des Marketings in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten spiegelt eine Reaktion der Unternehmen auf veränderte Markt...

Gegenstand der Vertriebspolitik (bzw. Distributionspolitik) sind die Entscheidungen und Tätigkeiten eines Unternehmens, die dazu dienen, das Ergebnis des betrieblichen Leistungsprozesses rechtzeitig an die Orte zu bringen, wo sie von Kunden gekauft, in Besitz genommen oder genutzt werden. Hier geht es zunächst um die Gestaltung von Vertriebssysteme...

Preispolitik umfasst alle Aktivitäten eines Anbieterunternehmens, mittels derer Preis-Leistungs-Relationen gesucht, ausgewählt und durchgesetzt werden. Im Kern umfasst die in diesem Kapitel erläuterte Preispolitik somit die Festsetzung von Preisen und die Realisierung der angestrebten Preise und der betreffenden Konditionen. Hierzu müssen die dazu...

Mit dem Begriff „Markt“ werden in der Wissenschaft wie in der Alltagssprache verschiedenartige Vorstellungen verbunden. Ausgehend von einem Verständnis, dass Unternehmen auf Märkten in vielfältigen Austauschbeziehungen mit verschiedenen Akteuren stehen, werden im vorliegenden Kapitel Konsumgüter- und Business-to-Business-Märkte sowie Sachgüter- und...

Da die Ausrichtung der Aktivitäten und Angebote von Unternehmen auf Kunden und deren Wünschen ein grundlegendes Kennzeichen des Marketings ist, stellt das Verständnis des Käuferverhaltens und darauf aufbauend die Entwicklung entsprechender Beeinflussungsmöglichkeiten einen wesentlichen Teilbereich des Marketings dar. Da sich das Kaufverhalten von K...

Die von einem Unternehmen bzw. einer strategischen Geschäftseinheit angebotenen Produkte sollen dazu dienen, die im Rahmen der Definition eines Geschäftsfelds genannten Nutzungsmöglichkeiten zu erfüllen, die den adressierten Kundengruppen offeriert werden bzw. werden sollen. In diesem Sinne geht es bei der in dem vorliegenden Kapitel erläuterten Pr...

Die Orientierung am Markt und die Beeinflussung von Marktbedingungen sind wesentliche Elemente des Marketings. Um sie realisieren zu können, müssen Anbieter Informationen über die Märkte und die Wirkungen der eigenen Beeinflussungsinstrumente sammeln und auswerten. Da in vielen (insbesondere Konsumgüter-)Märkten kaum direkte Beziehungen zwischen An...

Basierend auf den Überlegungen zur Entwicklung von Marketingstrategien (Kap. 5) sowie den Ausführungen zur Ausgestaltung der verschiedenen Instrumentalbereiche (Kap. 6, 7, 8 und 9) beschäftigt sich das vorliegende Kapitel zunächst mit der Planung des Marketing-Mix als sinnvolle und strategiegeleitete Kombination der Marketinginstrumente. Zudem werd...

Purpose This paper aims to argue that engagement with industry in research, while costly in terms of time and effort, can provide benefits in terms of measurable research impact, particularly in the business-to-business (B2B) domain. Design/methodology/approach This study draws joint experiences about how best to connect with an industry organizat...

Der Übergang von der Industriegesellschaft hin zur Dienstleistungsgesellschaft scheint zumindest in den entwickelten Volkswirtschaften abgeschlossen. Allerdings ist seit Beginn der 2010er Jahre in den wirtschaftlich bedeutendsten Ländern ein gewisser Stillstand dieser Entwicklung zu beobachten. Die aktuellen volkswirtschaftlichen Daten vermitteln d...

Purpose Multi-supplier project networks represent a large part of the business-to-business (B2B) sector as the scope of many projects requires that different providers participate in their development and delivery. This raises the question of how the integration of the resources of the various partners can be shaped successfully. Specifically, the...

Dieses Lehrbuch führt in die grundlegenden Konzepte, Methoden und Anwendungen des Marketings ein. Die Autoren gehen auf zentrale Fragestellungen klar und verständlich ein und veranschaulichen diese anhand von Beispielen aus der Unternehmenspraxis. Leser und Leserinnen können sich so ein Basiswissen verschaffen, das ihnen auch den Zugang zu speziell...

Purpose This paper aims to present a bibliometric overview of the leading trends of the journals in industrial marketing during for 25 years. Thus, the purpose is to carry out an analysis about contributions that industrial marketing or business to business (B2B) marketing discipline has done for scientific investigation, presenting a ranking of th...

In 2004, our article “Blueprinting the service company – managing service processes efficiently” was published in the Journal of Business Research. We were invited by the editor, Arch G. Woodside, to comment on the success of the article and the further development of the topics addressed, which we are most happy to do. The comment is organized as...

Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing. Despite extensive scholarly investigations and managerial interest though, considerations of customer engagement and emotional connections in business marketing have been scant. Researchers tend to focus on individual-level engagement, which is conceptually inadequate to address the...

The value concept is key to understanding purchasing and marketing decisions in business markets. Despite its importance, a lack of clarity surrounding the conceptualization of value in business-to-business markets persists. This paper develops an integrative framework that identifies the various conceptualizations of value and maps the most often...

Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing. Despite extensive scholarly investigations and managerial interest though, considerations of customer engagement and emotional connections in business marketing have been scant. Researchers tend to focus on individual-level engagement, which is conceptually inadequate to address the...

The value concept is key to understanding purchasing and marketing decisions in business markets. Despite its importance, a lack of clarity surrounding the conceptualization of value in business-to-business markets persists. This paper develops an integrative framework that identifies the various conceptualizations of value and maps the most often...

Despite its apparent relevance in service provision, research about customer engagement (CE) in the service context is scant. This investigation takes a broad approach on the topic and studies 1) antecedents of CE within the process of service provision, and 2) the impact of CE in the process of service provision on relational outcomes. We conducte...

The chief marketing officer (CMO) is the highest-level representative of marketing in a firm, giving marketing a voice in the top management team and critically shaping the firm’s marketing strategy. However, the business press has questioned the contribution of CMOs to firm performance, also by pointing to the short tenure of executives working in...