3. The Evaluation of Value Chain Marketing Strategies: An Agent-Based Approach

Value chain marketing (VCM) has shown to be a promising strategy to overcome immediate customers’ innovation resistance and thus increase the success of supplier innovations. By pursuing VCM, suppliers of entering goods such as raw materials, parts, or components enlarge their target group beyond their immediate customers (manufacturers) and target their downstream customers (applicators) as well. The nature of the VCM process depends on the timing of integrating the immediate customer. Based on the results of multiple case studies focusing on supplier innovations in the field of coatings and sealants, we confirmed that the effectiveness of VCM strategies depends on the newness of supplier innovation and the overlap between the knowledge bases of the involved actors. The analysis further suggested that the newness of innovation and the knowledge overlap are somehow interrelated. In order to assess the overall performance of VCM strategies, we propose an agent-based model and consider a multiplicity of VCM scenarios. In this paper, we provide a theoretical and conceptual foundation for the VCM model to simulate different settings in which supplier innovations are either implemented successfully or fail. We focus on the development of the model and not on the communication of the results of this model.