Communicating competence in the medical diagnostic industry. A customer view

The recent theoretical contribution of Golfetto (2003) has provided an enlightening perspective for an emerging practice in the business-to-business (BtoB) context: the so-called Competence-based-Communication (CBC). This approach suggests that managers should develop communication processes focusing on communicating the set of resources and capabilities that can create an added value for the customer. In order to see whether we could find empirical support for the hypothesis that adopting the CBC approach is worthwhile, we conducted a study to explore these issues from the customer's perspective, by surveying different categories of industrial customers about the types of information and communication tools they find most valuable when evaluating their suppliers’ value creation potential. Our first objective was to determine whether the different actors in the pipeline choose suppliers on the basis of their competencies. The most statistically significant finding on this matter was that, during purchasing decisions, all categories of customers consider the supplier’s resources and competencies to be more important than the product characteristics themselves. Our second objective was to understand what indicators, signs, and information sources are used to evaluate suppliers’ competencies. In this case, “experiential” tools (i.e., ones that allow the customer to test and anticipate a supplier’s products and services) turned out to be preferred by customers while evaluating a supplier’s potential. Overall, the results of the survey highlight the importance and the value of the CBC approach. Following our discussion of the contributions and limitations of the study, as well as the questions that remain to be answered, we propose a new research agenda for the study of BtoB communication