When Management and Customer See Eye to Eye: The Agreement Factor and Performance

Purpose – The paper aims to focus on management-customer relations as a way to understand the competitive advantages of small/medium-sized family businesses. The aim of this work is to verify whether management perceptions of business strengths and customer perceptions of the same strengths agree, and whether this agreement (perceptive concordance) can become an important factor in maintaining the firm’s competitive advantages. Design/methodology/approach – The research is carried out through a single case study with a sample of 120 customers. Findings – The findings indicate that when management and customers agree on certain business issues, performance benefits. Comparing management’s perception of strengths and customers’ perceptions of the same strengths allow one to relate what the firm thinks of itself to what the customer sees in it. Practical implications – The research offers useful information about the efficiency of the firm’s external communications and demonstrates that a shared language between the firm and its customers does exist and is understood by both entities. Moreover, practical implications are related to customers’ degree of satisfaction with respect to management beliefs, and to management’s opportunity to correct the weaknesses revealed by the agreement factor. Originality/value – The paper provides a different perspective on how to analyse competitive advantage inside small to medium-sized family businesses with cases and specific analyses not considered in depth by the family business literature. Keywords Family firms, Small to medium-sized enterprises, Perception, Buyer-seller relations, Competitive advantage Paper type Research paper