VC as a Business Concept

VC has attracted growing, and latterly intense, speculation, not least because it is now perceived as a key driver of satisfaction and loyalty. The many recent research documents published on this topic, have, ostensibly, addressed a single property, but preliminary investigation revealed that a range of associated, but different, ideas were being offered. Analysis of relevant sources enabled five distinct VC notions to be identified -

• Net VC (a utilitarian balancing of benefits and sacrifices),
• Marketing VC (concerned with product attributes alone),
• Derived VC (outcome related),
• Sale VC (low price, or reduction of sacrifice) and
• Rational VC (benefits expressed in units of exchange).

Further evaluation of the same sources identified that VC could be perceived in four distinct temporal forms -

• Ex-ante VC (pre-purchase),
• Transaction VC,
• Ex-poste VC (post-purchase/consumption), and
• Disposition VC.

It was also demonstrated that considerable consensus existed regarding relationships between quality, satisfaction, purchase and loyalty, and a provisional causal model was developed. However, although analysis to this point allowed for preliminary conclusions to be drawn, attributional, structural and dispositional characteristics were only partially defined. It was determined, therefore, that further extrapolation of available data would prove useful.