Antecedents and Benefits of a Preferred Customer Status in a Buyer-Supplier Relationship: A case study at Company X and four of its Key-Suppliers.

In the last decades there has been a growing trend in extensive supplier relationship management. Within the context of resource scarcity the topic of the preferred customer status has got grown attendance in the literature. This status leads to preferential resource allocation by a company’s supplier. But also numerous other benefits are related to it like better access to innovations, more favorable pricing, superior product quality or shorter lead times. While the topic has been mentioned in an increasing amount of papers in the last year, most of them have solely a theoretical scope without elements from practice. Therefore, as part of this paper, a case study was conducted at Company X and four of its key suppliers to investigate antecedents and benefits of a preferred customer status in practice. Whereas many of the benefits and antecedents identified in the literature could be reinforced by the findings of this paper, also new benefits were found.