The practice of customer value creation and market effectiveness among low-tech SMEs

Low-tech firms by definition can rarely establish their competitive advantage on new technological knowledge which is why such firms and low-tech SMEs in particular has to find other means to compete. As value creation is increasingly considered the core of staying competitive independent of the firm size and industry characteristics, the practice of customer value creation and resulting market effectiveness becomes topical in terms of competition management. Acknowledging the complexity of a contemporary phenomenon of this type, an attempt is made to understand the customer value creation in its real-life context through an international case study approach. Emerging qualitative research findings indicate that high performing firms apply high design and high quality related activities more often than the less successful firms in addition to which corresponding high end products are expressed representatively. Low performance firms in turn more frequently base their value creation on lower price characteristics and product and company information only. The subsequent statistical analysis confirms the significance of representative presentation and indicates further that interaction which is made possible to customers with designers has the biggest antecedent influence to market effectiveness. However, so far no statistically significant value creation strategy could be identified which would have been capable of differentiating case firms by their market effectiveness. In exploring empirically the practice of SME value creation the study offers some firsthand evidence and managerial guidance as to SME value creation and corresponding market effectiveness.