Who Is the Customer? On Multiple-Customer Representation in Supply Chains

Abstract

Background: Customer orders are key in developing logistics processes and in strategic developments of customer orientation. This paper investigates the notion of customer orientation. In the literature, the concept of customer is underdeveloped in that it is seen as a single object rather than how it is enacted in multiple ways. The study examines a customer-oriented production process managed in the supply chain of an automotive manufacturer. Methods: Based on a longitudinal study we explain what constitutes customer knowledge and what processes are involved in constructing this knowledge. Results: The study shows that in a supply chain, multiple versions of customers coexist and overlap that have implications on how multiple-customer orientation is performed and aligned in the supply chain. Conclusions: We find that customer representations proliferate as a result of multiple objectives; we demonstrate what objects and assemblages bring particular customer representation to life and show that these are used to shape customer orientation.

1. Introduction

Customer centricity has been a core tenet of marketing theory for well over half a century. The origins of customer centricity can be traced back to Peter Drucker (p. 32, [1]) who wrote, ‘The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. He alone gives employment’. A few years later, Robert Keith and Ted Levitt appropriated Drucker’s insight and elevated it to a foundational concept in marketing. Keith (p. 35, [2]), using the metaphor of a Copernican revolution, proclaimed, ‘Companies revolve around the customer, not the other way around’. In the same year, Levitt (p. 56, [3]) cautioned: ‘…the organization must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it’. Kotler [4], in the first edition of a textbook that was to become a long-term publishing success, established a customer-oriented focus as one of the pillars of a revised marketing concept. Also, both in retrospective and future logistics and supply chain management research, customer orientation is a topic that continues to attract interest [5].

And yet, there is plenty of evidence that a customer-centric focus as a normative injunction for business has not been matched by a focus on the customer as a theoretical or managerial object. As Shah et al. [6] observed, it was not until the 1990s that research related to customer centricity took off. A number of concepts such as customer orientation, market orientation, and market-driven organizations have been put forward as variations on the theme of customer centricity. All these concepts share ‘…the set of beliefs that puts the customer’s interest first, while not excluding those of all other stakeholders … in order to develop a long-term profitable [viable] enterprise’ (p. 27, [7]).

The problem is that the customer is far from a clear-cut and unambiguous entity. This aspect is rarely if ever touched upon in the customer-centricity literature (but see Gummesson [8]). A critical examination of what a customer is missing. In this paper, we problematize the notion of the customer and how it is deployed in practice, in order to question existing theoretical vocabularies and offer possibilities to broaden the range of research questions on customer centricity [9,10]. Complexity, context, and dynamics of customer centricity need to be better understood [11], which is possible with an approach that accounts for multiple views of how the customer performs [12] with implications for logistics and supply chain professionals work with order-to-delivery processes and on-time deliveries in terms of practical coordination and negotiations among integrated supply chain actors [13].

As a theoretical starting point, we note that, in contrast to marketing’s treatment of customers, the accounting literature has questioned the univocal and simplistic representations of customers and wondered whether privileging customers’ interests is compatible with long-term profitability. A number of empirical studies have shown that multiple representations of the customer prevail in the same firm and that adopting a customer orientation may cause internal conflicts and even contribute to the marginalization of customer voices [14,15,16,17,18]. These alternative perspectives on customer orientation offer useful insights into market practice.

This paper examines how a customer-oriented production process is managed in the supply chain of an automotive manufacturer. In short, arguments over customer centricity are taken to the supply chain level. More specifically, we study what constitutes customer orientation, how the customer is represented in different parts in the supply chain, and how multiple meanings are aligned by the focal firm’s supply chain strategy. We treat customer representations as objects or entities that are ‘…constructed by actors as they make sense, name, stabilize, represent and enact foci for their actions and activities’ (p. 310, [19]). The second theoretical move, closely related to seeing customer representations as objects, is to embrace the notion of multiplicity [20,21]. We take multiplicity as an ontological rather than an epistemological problem [12]. In other words, we do not see multiplicity as the outcome of varying interpretations of a unique underlying entity, but as a case of multiple entities that may overlap, however only to some degree. Multiple enactments of the customer, for example, do not necessarily mean fragmentation and incoherence since they appear differently in different locations, but may highlight tensions and frictions in a customer-oriented supply chain. Our empirical material suggests that multiple versions of the ‘customer’ appear at different points in the supply chain, resulting in what we call different socio-technical assemblages: a customer-oriented and a cost–volume assemblage in our example. These assemblages coexist and compete with each other, drawing on the same resources but presenting fundamentally different versions of the customer.

While the concept of customer centricity has historical roots in various management traditions, including quality management approaches such as CWQC (Company Wide Quality Control) och TQM (Total Quality Management), this paper is grounded in the literature on marketing and supply chain management. Our focus is on how customer centricity has evolved as a strategic and organizational concern in these domains, particularly in relation to customer orientation, market practice, and supply chain coordination. As such, we do not engage with the quality management tradition in detail, as it lies outside the theoretical scope of this study.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how customer centricity is enacted and coordinated in a supply chain context where multiple, and sometimes conflicting, representations of the customer coexist. While customer centricity has been extensively discussed in marketing and increasingly in supply chain management, there is a lack of research that critically examines the customer as a constructed and contested object within operational processes. This study addresses this gap by exploring how different actors in an automotive supply chain perform and negotiate customer representations, and how these representations shape production strategies and coordination practices. By doing so, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of customer orientation as a dynamic and situated phenomenon in logistics and supply chain research.

The paper is structured as follows: in the Section 2 we look at the assumptions that underpin customer centricity in marketing. In the Section 3 we examine how the literature has treated customer representation in firms and propose a framework that takes into account relevant versions of the customer, namely market practice. In the Section 4, we illustrate the notion of the customer as a multiple and ambivalent management object whose representations have performative impact in a longitudinal case study. We outline the method and our empirical study of customer representations in an automotive supply chain. Section 5 discusses the implications in response to customer orientation literature and in response to market practice literature. Section 6 concludes the discussion and suggests practical and research implications.

2. Customer-Centricity Background

The customer is more often than not represented as a naturalized entity in contemporary marketing literature. However, the problem is how to build knowledge about the customer and how to set up truly customer-centric organizations [22]. As an example, the customer is at the core of the market orientation research program [23]. All conceptualizations of market orientation imply coordinated action among business functions, based on shared customer understanding [24,25]. Thus, building detailed knowledge of customers is regarded as crucial and as having significant impacts on performance. Kohli and Jaworski [26] argue that with a few exceptions, the literature tends to view the concept of market orientation as a universally relevant philosophy, but practice suggests that implementing a customer or market orientation is far from straightforward.

Firms that are building a market or customer orientation generally set up large databases about customers, share that information widely, and change the culture, structures, processes, and performance metrics that will nudge recalcitrant organizations to adopt customer centricity [6,27]. This process will continue to evolve as new information technology tools become available to enhance the collection, analysis, and storage of customer information. In short, customer centricity is a challenging but progressively tractable informational and organizational issue.

Research confirms that customer orientation at large is challenging but rewarding. On the basis of a review of 514 marketing orientation articles, Liao et al. [28] state that the bulk of marketing orientation research investigates the link to performance, such as an organization’s ability to survive and grow. The findings are ambiguous [28,29]. Different studies report that market orientation is strongly related, related, and weakly related to performance, but there are also studies indicating that there is no significant relationship at all between market orientation and performance [28]. Using a longitudinal survey study, Rindfleisch and Moorman [30] suggest that firms engaged in cooperative alliances with competitors will become less customer oriented over time. In alliances dominated by competitors, firms experience a significant decrease in their level of customer orientation, which is not the case for firms in alliances dominated by channel members. What happened in these situations? And is it possible to outline firms that collaborate either with competitors or with their supply chain? In practice, supply chain actors collaborate and compete [31].

Market orientation has developed gradually into a coherent whole supported by a body of theory, empirical generalizations, and normative implications. However, the dynamics and complexity of customer orientation become circumscribed by methodological considerations. The common method to operationalize customer orientation relies on cross-sectional surveys [23]. The methodological strategy is to specify principles, assume stability, and draw on objectivist ontology to create a comprehensive picture of the object. These simplifications generate methodologically sound results, even if they are not useful for understanding decision making or action [21]. These methodological preferences stand in sharp contrast to understanding customers over time taking into account complexity and dynamics.

The role of the business network, including close relationships with suppliers and customers, is downplayed in most market and customer orientation studies [32]. Customer orientation is not an objective entity. In dyadic evaluations, a supplier may value their customer orientation higher than the customers do [33,34]. Misperceptions and adaptations are hardly discussed in the market orientation literature, but how the customer is constructed and enacted is key in order to implement and develop customer orientation. The findings from dyadic evaluations are not just two complementary perspectives on the same, single object. Our argument is that the construction of the customer is as important as the construction of markets. The market studies literature that draws on economic sociology has argued that there is no pre-defined market but the market is co-constructed by network actors in a way that the individual organization can only influence to some extent [35].

Kjellberg and Helgesson’s [12] view is one of multiple market practices that are engaged in the shaping of markets. Market practices are made of overlapping lived market ideas and realities that are maintained and interrelated through chains of translations. In this view, performativity and multiplicity tell us about multiple versions of markets. The story is far more serious than the one about different perspectives, because these different perspectives are lived—there is a simultaneous presence of a multitude of market practices. The problem is in the difference or, to be more precise, how to coordinate these realities in practice. Kjellberg and Helgesson (p. 849, [12]) say that tensions and controversies may arise as a consequence of multiple and at times incompatible practices. However, different versions of the same market that are performed simultaneously need not be at odds with each other but may coexist more or less peacefully. Kjellberg and Helgesson have identified two general methods of managing the incompatibility of multiple versions, (1) avoiding encounters between incompatible practices, either by a separation of incompatible practices in time and space or by orchestrated coupling, or (2) managing incompatibility through coordination techniques.

We know little about customer orientation unless we bring it to life. The very nature of customers and markets needs to be addressed [26]. In the market orientation patchwork of overlapping and conflicting findings, most articles are about what the concept can do [36] with little indication of how to actually bring the concept to life [28,37]. There are few, if any, process studies that explain dynamics of the phases of buyer–seller relationships in relation to market orientation and customer orientation [38]. Flesh and blood are related to ambiguities and settlement of customer orientation.

This study draws on insights from marketing, accounting, and sociology to examine customer orientation not as a fixed managerial principle, but as a situated and performative practice. While marketing literature has traditionally conceptualized customer centricity as a normative ideal, and accounting literature has problematized its implications for profitability and internal coherence, our contribution lies in showing how customer orientation is enacted through practical coordination in supply chain settings. In doing so, we respond to calls within logistics research [5,13,39] to better understand the operational complexities of customer orientation.

By analyzing how different customer representations are mobilized within competing assemblages—such as the customer–order and cost–volume logics—we offer a practice-based perspective that highlights the tensions, negotiations, and trade-offs involved in making supply chains customer-oriented. We argue that customer orientation is not a stable end-state, but a continuous process of learning with others in the supply chain, including customers themselves. This process involves simplifications, mutual adjustments, and the coordination of distributed knowledge over time. Our approach complements and extends the existing literature on logistics by focusing on the multiplicity and performativity of the customer as a management object, and by emphasizing the dynamic, situated nature of customer-oriented strategies in complex supply chain environments.

3. Customer Representations

In this section, we will propose that customer orientation is to deal with multiple and overlapping realities of the customer. Management accounting literature has a short albeit enlightening tradition of problematizing representations of customers that has much relevance to the literature on marketing and supply chain management. This literature has explored how one organization might mobilize customer representations in different ways and that is the topic we will address next. Thereafter, the construction and multiple versions of customers are explained, in order to better understand our empirical case, i.e., of multiple versions of customers not only in an organization but in a supply chain. The customer multiple draws on the title of the book The body multiple [20], a fascinating analysis of artherosclerosis, advancing the argument that artherosclerosis is multiple on the basis of the different practices on how the disease is enacted. In a similar way, the customer multiple indicates that we reject the view of the customer as a single reality, and instead propose to understand the customer as a series of partially coherent and coordinated enactments.

3.1. Constructing the Customer Within the Firm

Mouritsen [14] argues that customer needs are not self-evident but are given voice by the constructions of particular organizational actors. These voices filter and interpret customer needs through particular representational forms. Cooper (p. 257, [40]) observes that managers do not work directly on the environment, but on models, maps, numbers, and formulae that represent that environment. Similarly, Czarniawska and Mouritsen (p. 172, [41]) speak of management technologies that simplify complex objects such as people, technologies, and organizations. These objects are represented as sets of simplified traits that make them visible and manageable. But this simplification is not without costs. Management technologies move some things into the foreground while obscuring others, and the representations they produce are never comprehensive or definitive.

In the process of representing customers, organizational actors make use of different management technologies and thus make up different customer objects. We use the term management technologies to describe the multiple forms of representations that abbreviate, condense, and represent the main features of economic environments [42], while we regard objects as ‘…constructed by actors as they make sense, name, stabilize, represent and enact foci for their actions and activities’ (p. 310, [19]). Thus, management technologies and management objects are inextricably linked—management objects are always the product of management technologies that render them visible and governable. For example, Kohli and Jaworski [26] argue that market orientation offers a framework and a focus for actions of individuals and departments in the organization. The aim is to make market orientation a management technology that creates manageable objects out of a heterogeneous set of customers and brings those objects to the kernel of the organization.

In accounting literature, the notion that customer needs can be articulated in one voice and that these needs provide a platform around which internal processes can be redesigned is seen as a dangerous fallacy. Empirical studies have addressed how the figure of the customer is objectified and brought to bear on managerial practices inside firms [16,17]. Vaivio [17] illustrates how a customer is depersonalized by a supplier and turned into a calculable space. In this case, this calculable space becomes a site for encounters between rival professional experts. Customer orientation is constructed in two different ways. First, sales staff view the customer as a heterogeneous and dynamic entity with evolving needs. Sales saw themselves as the ambassador for the customer and an interpreter of his needs. The organization’s offering had to be customized to this highly specific view of each customer. But, the customer also came to be recognized as what Vaivio [17] called a quantified customer, a depersonalized and abstract subject, identifiable through formal statements supported by a set of metrics. Measures regarding different types of complaints, delivery precision, and service fulfillment among others made up a stable picture of a quantified customer around which operational processes could be reorganized.

An objectified approach to the customer was made possible and sought to supersede the more traditional, situated, and tacit image of the customer portrayed by sales. A set of metrics focused attention on the urgency of improvement in all areas of the organization, since the customer could now be interpreted as fitting into a standard and quantified set of aggregate measures. What was not calculable became marginalized. Customer representations that relied on qualitative and idiosyncratic measures would become invisible and go unnoticed. But, if the quantified customer relied on a distal and objectified view of customers, the sales customer was built on a myriad of mundane knowledge snippets about the particularities of each customer. Vaivio [17] describes how organizational action was shaped by the confrontation between these two alternative logics, one relying on distal and objectified representations and the other promoting a proximal, informal, and qualitative view of the customer.

Cuganesan [16] extended Vaivio’s study through an ethnographic, actor-network-inspired study of how a wholesale financial services firm pursued a strategy of customer intimacy. The study found rival enactments of customer intimacy through what Cuganesan labeled a ‘numeric calculation’ and a ‘sales calculation’ network. In the numeric calculation logic, customer intimacy was objectified through a series of performance metrics and relied heavily on measures provided by external market research. These resulted in ‘…an aggregated, homogenized and depersonalized construction of customers’ (16:92). In the sales calculation logic, the quantified measures were destabilized in favor of more nuanced and qualitative judgments of specific customers, facilitated by regular talk and communication through co-location.

These two studies show how in organizations, ‘the customer’ is objectified in a variety of ways with implications for operational processes, what counts as professional expertise, and where power resides. Our argument is that in a supply chain, there are good reasons to believe that differences in customer representations may be sharper and have many more ramifications than the ones described by [16,17] at an intraorganizational level. Customers as management objects can thus take multiple forms. The important research is how these multiple entities are grouped under the same label and how this multiplicity is coordinated within and across organizational boundaries.

3.2. The Customer Multiple

The studies by illustrate how different representations of the customer have implications for organizational processes [16,17], for what counts as professional expertise, and where decision powers reside. Cochoy (p. S54, [43]) presents a broader view of ‘the customer’ as an abstract entity and how it has evolved over time:

‘The customer’ has multiplied considerably over the century. The industrial customer gave rise to the consumer customer and the rights-endowed customer; these in turn were transformed into standardized or consumer activist customers, these into quality order-placer customers and ultimately, quality citizen-customers. Over these generations, the family of customers has penetrated downward (into the organization) and upward (into policy), all the while circulating continuously from one space to another via the market. The figure of the customer is clearly that of central agent in ‘marketizing’ organization (via quality) and organizing the market (via traceability).

The nature of customer representations, thus, has implications for societal as well as market processes. The figure of the customer is complex, and attempts to rationalize it are always incomplete and fragile [43]. Simplifications are useful in that customers might ‘let themselves be supported’ by calculative instruments such as vendor rating schemes, by attempts to attract them, and by other ways of structuring the buying process. The understanding of management technologies, their affordances, and consequences to construct different types of customers offers novel possibilities to understand customer orientation.

Using a product development example, Dubuisson-Quellier [44] illustrates how a plurality of customer definitions may be pursued by a variety of professionals in the same firm (e.g., R&D engineer, marketing manager, and sales manager) engaged in qualifying both the product and the customer. Nothing predisposes these actors to share the same definition of the customer and his or her wants—a plurality of definitions will remain in play as well as a continuous adjustment among different definitions. In the supply chain the continuous adjustments implies well-functioning supply chain integration while the plurality of customer representations obscures the supply chain objectives.

Vaivio [17] and Cuganesan [16] lay emphasis on the intraorganizational processes that produce multiple and temporary qualifications of customers, assisted by external market research data. In a supply chain context involving multiple actors, a proliferation of representations of the customer is to be expected. However, these representations should not be regarded simply as different pictures of the same object. Callon’s [45,46,47] performativity argument suggests that models and representations do not just hold a mirror to an objective and external world. They can be ‘flawed’ from a purely representational logic, meaning that they do not constitute faithful reproductions of the objects they supposedly portray, and yet have a performative character in the sense that they are implicated in the construction of the realities they purportedly describe in a mirror-like fashion. The performative argument suggests that markets are practical outcomes; they depend on knowledge, statements, and representations that bring about their existence as both objects of knowledge and arenas for intervention. Thus, actions taken on behalf of customers, including knowledge statements about customers, play a crucial role in markets. They impact on the workings of markets, how exchanges are negotiated, and what adaptations are carried out.

If customer representations play a role in the constitution of customer orientation, for example, and these representations produce multiple objects, then the multiple logics of action are important to account for in theoretical descriptions. Callon [46] refers to such relationships between statements and their worlds as socio-technical assemblages or agencements, because of the recursive adjustments between statements and action. To give an example, what is known as ‘the economy’ is a series of agencements (e.g., rules, models, statements) that qualify themselves as economic. Knowledge and representations about the economy are not restricted to those identified with the economics profession. Many different actors take part in producing and circulating knowledge about the economy, both formal, such as regulatory authorities and the management sciences, and informal, such as the situated knowledge of buyers and sellers in particular domains. In short, multiplicity is the key characteristic of these assemblages [48,49]. In the following section, we use a case study of an automotive supply chain to shed light on how customer representations proliferate across the actors that comprise a supply chain and how those representations help perform different but still related socio-technical assemblages.

4. A Study of the Customer as a Multiple and Ambivalent Object in Supply Chains: Material and Methods

This paper is based on a longitudinal process study of an automotive supply chain, focusing on the implementation and evolution of a customer-ordered production strategy. The study investigates how customer orientation is enacted in practice through the coordination of multiple and sometimes conflicting representations of the customer across supply chain actors.

4.1. Data Collection and Sampling

The empirical material consists of over 60 interviews conducted in two main phases. The first phase (1993–1997) included more than 40 interviews and focused on the initial shift from a cost efficiency strategy to a market-responsive model. The second phase (2003–2008) involved over 20 interviews and examined the development and performance of customer-ordered production over time.

Interviewees were selected using a snowball sampling strategy, where initial contacts led to further participants based on their relevance to the evolving case. The sample included a wide range of actors: the CEO and managers in production, planning, sales, purchasing, logistics, and IT at the OEM; dealers and national sales agents in Europe; key account managers at supplier firms; and representatives from logistics providers. This diversity allowed us to capture multiple perspectives on customer orientation across the supply chain.

In addition to interviews, data sources included informal discussions, formal meetings, internal presentation materials, internal statistics and reports, press releases, and in situ observations. This triangulation of data sources enhanced the richness and credibility of the findings.

4.2. Analytical Strategy

The analysis followed a qualitative, abductive approach. Interview transcripts and field notes were coded thematically, with a focus on how different actors described, enacted, and negotiated the customer. The coding process was iterative and informed by theoretical concepts from practice theory and socio-technical assemblage thinking.

To structure the longitudinal data, we applied a temporal bracketing strategy [50], dividing the process into two analytically distinct but connected phases of customer-ordered production. This approach enabled us to examine how customer representations and coordination practices evolved over time, and how tensions between customer orientation and cost–volume logics were managed.

4.3. Methodological Framing

The study is informed by methodological principles for studying socio-technical assemblages [51,52], including following actors, focusing on controversies, and grounding analysis in empirical evidence. These principles guided our efforts to trace how customer representations were constructed and mobilized across the supply chain, particularly in relation to the order-to-delivery process.

A central controversy in the case concerned the tension between customer orientation and cost/volume orientation. This tension manifested in competing enactments of the customer by different actors—end customers, dealers, sales companies, assemblers, and suppliers—each drawing on different logics and priorities. Rather than assuming a unified customer perspective, we treat these enactments as socio-technical assemblages that evolve over time and require ongoing coordination.

4.4. Results: Customer-Ordered Production’s View of the Customer

Volvo Cars’ customer-ordered production aims to postpone assembly of cars until a customer order arrives. The customer configures the final car out of a large number of options, and Volvo Cars is able to respond to the order in about 20 days in markets closer to the manufacturing plants and about 35 days in more distant markets. Lead times to build a customized car are tight and detailed organizational and interorganizational procedures are needed to coordinate the material for the order. The close coordination among supply chain actors makes the complexity involved in the process manageable. The short lead times reduce the costs of inventories, for example. Customer-ordered production not only postpones the assembly of cars, but it also changes the selling situation. Dealer stocks would in principle be abolished together with clearance sales. Dealer showrooms would merely serve as sites to exhibit cars, and salespeople would act as facilitators and product experts, helping the customer configure the chosen car.

Customer-ordered production also relates to the positioning of the car assembler. In the automotive industry, Volvo Cars’ global market share is below two percent. Volvo is seen as a premium brand that yields higher margins than higher-volume competitors, justified by the emphasis on quality, customer experience, and the pleasure of driving dynamics. Customer orientation means that the cars need to attract customers who prize a high degree of individuality rather than settle for a pre-produced model. Research and development strives to keep the unique features of the marque, to develop novelty that attracts different types of customers and leads to volume growth, and to develop cost-efficient solutions.

Supply chain coordination was both planned and emergent with dedicated managerial, cross-functional, and interorganizational teams. Shorter lead times, quality assurance, delivery precision, and common understanding of production are some of the results produced by this tight coordination. However, this work seldom included customers. The customer is seen as a premium product buyer and as an order initiator.

However, in the bigger picture that top management is interested in, the customer was also important in terms of volume. Volume growth was hardly satisfactory and questions arose as to whether the dealers had metamorphosed into passive order takers. Customer orientation was undisputed as a principle but volume growth and the associated economies of scale became a controversial subject. The accuracy of forecasts grew in importance and became loaded with incentives. Customer and forecast orders were now used interchangeably in the production system. More and more cars were sold as pre-produced models or at least pre-ordered bundles of options. Package prices and weekend promotion events at dealers acted as baits to attract customers.

The order-to-delivery process continued with a renewed interest in customer orientation and economies of scale (volume growth). The same procedures and coordination were used for volume growth actions as for customer-ordered production. In addition, the volume growth objective was accompanied by new cost-cutting rules that hit the order-to-delivery process disproportionately because they impacted on functional and organizational cost centers. The adapted way to enact customer-ordered production gave rise to new offerings in which cars were only partially customized and which boosted sales. The former customer-oriented sales model now targeted number of cars sold in a certain time period. Incentives were attached to volume, which now created a model of the customer as a bargain hunter who prized access to a package of innovative features sold at a lower price. The customers who preferred to configure their own cars had to accept a higher price for sometimes fewer features as well as wait longer for delivery.

4.5. Results: The Dealer’s View of the Customer

Customer-ordered production strengthened dealers, transforming them into service providers characterized by higher levels of professionalism and expert legitimacy. The sales process was changed into an encounter where the car was configured by the customer assisted by the dealer. The process was facilitated by information technology that simulated actual car choices and guided the process of selecting options. Sales staff claimed that customers are rather good salespeople themselves because they often volunteer to add on extras in this situation. The version of the customer envisioned by the customer-ordered production model was actively performed in these situations.

The problematic notion of volume growth had a strong impact on dealer–customer relationships. Volume growth incentives made up a large proportion of dealers’ revenues, and customer orders were needed in order to reach sales quotas in any one period. In this case, customers merely represented orders. The sales process became a headcount recruitment exercise that worked well in the short term, especially for private customers. However, despite increasing sales, the customer who wanted a customized car but bought a pre-produced car at a discount was dissatisfied and expressed this view through the post-sales survey producing a low customer satisfaction score. In short, the volume growth imperative led to both higher sales and dissatisfied customers.

The dealer played an important role in the quest for customer orientation. In its role as a service provider, the dealer could manipulate conditions associated with a particular order. If conditions changed, then it was still possible to change the order as long as inbound supply could be organized. For example, after placing an order the customer might express an interest in changing some of the selected options. At this point, the dealer changed the order and reconfigured the car, because the service was seen as beginning—not ending—when the sales contract was signed. When pre-produced cars are sold, the dealer cannot engage in the same type of customer relationship. Instead, they need to assess the customer as a set of variables, such as payment options and whether there is enough purchase interest on the customer’s part.

4.6. Results: The Sales Company’s Notion of the Customer

Sales companies were regional (most often also national) automobile trading companies for marketing activities, and the Swedish dealers worked with the Nordic sales company managed from Gothenburg, Volvo Personbilar Sverige (VPS), a subsidiary of Volvo Cars. In the order-to-delivery process, VPS facilitated dealers’ operations. They argue that the sales model of customer-ordered production was needed in a premium-brand business model in which the cars and accessories involve advanced product development. The operations of VPS involved interaction with dealers in order to improve knowledge of future sales and the quality of forecasts. VPS acted as a market expert that interpreted patterns in the choices made by customers. VPS interpreted sales figures and looked for commonality across customer choices that did not vary much and were influenced by broader societal trends. In short, VPS enacted trends, interacted with influencers, and carried out promotion and marketing activities based on what it identified as customer commonalities.

In customer-ordered production, VPS supported the dealers. A problematic notion of volume growth relates to VPS–dealer relationship with consequences for the dealer–customer relationship. VPS accepted volume growth challenges and constructed volume growth incentives for the dealers. In this situation, it was rewarding for the dealers to follow these changes. The interaction with dealers in order to improve knowledge of future sales and quality of forecasts was moved to the background, while forecasts based on volume growth challenges came to the foreground. The customer-sensitized dealer was overshadowed by volume growth challenges. These sales challenges are quite common as tools to incentivize efforts by sales people, and thus they did not appear out of place in this context.

The volume growth objective with accompanying incentives was managed by VPS, which negotiated and monitored dealers’ sales figures. The incentive system was aimed at increasing volumes, stimulating demand, and increasing capacity utilization. VPS argued that dealers needed to be pushed in order to actively sell. On the other hand, the consequences of incentives in terms of vehicle stocks was a great risk to the dealers’ financial situation; their preferred business model would be damaged, and the tension between the dual roles of VPS as a facilitator and an incentive calculator strained its relationships with dealers.

4.7. Results: Manufacturing’s Notion of the Customer

An increased customer orientation was also a product development objective. However, it was not so easy to involve the customer in development work. Successful customer involvement occurred in a few cases (see, for example, the XC90 project described in Dahlsten [53]). The ambition was to objectify what constitutes use-value for important customers but most often a summary measure of customer value was added to the development work [53,54].

In the customer-ordered production model, every car is ordered by a customer, while supply chain planning and purchasing is based on forecasts. There is a need of flexibility in order to manage the gap between plans and orders. The more than 2000 dealers in Europe were allowed to continuously make changes in their upstream orders if the customers changed their sales order. Stock orders approximated customer orders in order to reach sales targets. In such cases, sales tried to match the stock orders to a customer before production started. Then, only some changes in the configuration were needed; unless the dealers succeeded in finding a customer they preferred to change the configuration to a no-extra stock car in order to minimize the risk of ownership. The realization of the forecasted plans and the stock orders in customer orders caused a huge number of changes.

The planning and ordering department had to put in extra work to coordinate several actors, involving the plant, planners, purchasers, supplier planners, and suppliers’ sales functions to handle these changes. The coordination for securing production materials was structured by planning and ordering procedures that restricted the changes that the supply chain could manage. A change in the basis of the incentive system from sales targets to order targets left room for speculative orders that could be amended later on. A number of changes could be accommodated, but now changes added costs and could hinder change needed to uphold customer service. Planning and ordering people needed to manage orders and changes in the same way regardless of whether real customers or dealers responding to incentives were the order originators. Complex planning processes were used in a dynamic way. This handling caused a number of conflicts among people in the delivery, coordination, and sales/purchasing functions. The variability of these changes spread to other actors. Production planning was based on customer orders and resulted in a production plan and delivery schedules. It was governed by agreed-upon procedures, but exceptions were still possible, meaning that manual checks made sure that an order could be accepted, for example, by discussing an issue with a supplier. Volume growth forecasts and order processing created an increased number of exceptions and stiffened supplier resistance to late changes. Changes in the order-to-delivery process resulted in a planning and ordering picture of the customer as unpredictable and often problematic.

The purchasing department is closely related to the order-to-delivery process and the product development process. However, purchasing is also engaged in its own high-profile objectives, such as synergy seeking, outsourcing, and sustainability. The customer is represented indirectly via, for example, lean and flexible production models. The purchaser buys tools for specific models in production, meets suppliers, and arranges for materials delivery. Flexibility in response to changes of orders is a stipulation in the contract that purchasers do not pay much attention to. Flexibility is difficult to relate to the other objectives of purchasers. The relationship between flexibility and the premium-brand image is not as transparent or intuitive as the relationship between quality forged by lean methods and the premium car. The variability of demand was troublesome for the manufacturing system. Purchasing was held responsible for costs and annual cost reductions rather than customer orientation or flexibility.

4.8. Results: The Suppliers’ View of the Customer

The customer order did not just affect planning/ordering at Volvo Cars. Upstream suppliers relied on Volvo orders, which affected the next tier’s optimization of batches, production series, delays in production, and so on. For system suppliers, each system was individualized for a specific car at a specific time on the assembly line. In this case, the customer was a car in the making, regardless of whether it was going to be delivered to a named customer or was going to a dealer’s stock. The many late changes of orders convinced suppliers of exclusive parts that the customer was too unpredictable to be taken seriously, as far as planning production was concerned. This unpredictability was embodied in the rhetoric that placed forecasts in the foreground and customer orders in the background.

In the next section, we will take up the notion of a biography of the customer. This social entity, the customer, is objectified and changed as different notions of the customer come into contact with supply chain actors. There are dynamics of association as well as of dissociation at play in these processes.

5. Discussing the Multiple and Ambivalent Customer in Customer-Oriented Production

Multiple customer representations are enacted simultaneously for reasons of customer orientation and cost/volume orientation. In the Volvo supply chain, customer orientation is central but it is an ambivalent conceptual object moving around in organizations and the supply chain [16,17,43]. Our tracking of customer representations involves a number of actors creating different versions of the customer, such as the customer-ordered-production strategy, dealers, sales company, manufacturer, the supplier, and the research community with its formalization of strategic principles. All these actors are active in the constitution of the order-to-delivery process.

In customer-ordered-production strategy, the customer was seen as a premium product user and as an order initiator. Simultaneously, managers related the customer to volume growth and associated economies of scale, which interfered with the customer-ordered-production strategy’s notion of the customer. The customer is enacted in both of these practices and the relationship between these is complex but to some extent coordinated [20]. The number of cars sold in a certain period increased in importance, which indicates that volume growth practices suppressed customer order practices. The multiplicity was managed by postponing the resolution of incompatibility to some other situation [12].

Two different assemblages, both involving the customer, came into play: the customer–order assemblage and the cost–volume assemblage. Both involved the same resources and both related to the customer, but their qualification and quantification of the customer differed. The dealer’s notion of the customer had been influenced by the possibilities afforded by customer-ordered production. In this assemblage, customers were qualified as competent sales persons themselves. In the cost–volume assemblage, private customers in particular became objects or targets in sales incentive schemes. The customers thus became reduced to a set of variables, namely their ability to pay and their plausibility as sales prospects. These parallel assemblages used the opportunities afforded by the production system to reconfigure orders in the name of the customer, but these limited possibilities to alter orders affected real customer orders harder than dealer stock orders.

The sales company’s notion of the customer was closely related to the notion of a premium product and how it should be sold. First-hand contacts with customers were sporadic. Instead, customers were featured through aggregate trends, and the interaction with customers was mediated through promotion and marketing activities based on measures of customer commonality. The sales company constructed customer representations mainly in terms of volume growth incentives. In line with Kjellberg and Helgesson [12], the ‘incompatible’ practices could co-exist as the sales company was able to translate the tensions.

Manufacturing’s notion of the customer involves multiple customer objects, as was the case in the studies by Cuganesan [16] and Vaivio [17]. Product developers needed to assess use-value and viewed the customer as an expert user but more often than not used a summary measure of customer value. In the order/planning process, the customer was an order that needed to be matched to capacity. The customer was seen through the orders; customer orders were important and coordination was extensive despite the suspicion that the customer was a fiction generated by dealer orders. However, planning and ordering routines cleared material that was used for an order number regardless of whether it was connected to a real customer or to a dealer’s stock. The degree of stock orders had increased and as the orders were treated in the same way, the limited flexibility bought off suppliers was used up. The customer was overshadowed by the potential for increased income streams that did not directly target the traditional view of forecasts based on customer knowledge. Purchasing viewed the customer as someone demanding in terms of, for example, cost levels, or corporate social responsibility as an external assessor. The supplier’s notion of the customer was related to Volvo Cars and the supply chain procedures demanded by the company. Supply chain procedures demanded individualized systems in the assembly of customer orders but the notion of the customer related to the car in the making.

If we assume the existence of multiple customer objects [21,55], then a biography of the customer can illustrate the career of an object that travels across time and multiple organizations [56,57,58]. The customer is never a fully stabilized entity but acquires novel properties as it travels through the supply chain [19,40]. Multiple versions of the customer are performed that outline the concept of customer orientation to be situated in different parallel contexts, as described in management accounting literature rather than customer orientation literature.

Figure 1 sketches the multiplicity of representations of the customer that proliferate in the supply chain. The customer is theorized as an object in both the customer order and the cost–volume assemblages, as the customer multiple (c.f. [12,20]). Each actor in the supply chain will view the customer differently depending on situated practices, which assemblage is being invoked, and in what context.

A supply chain view offers a number of possibilities for defining customer orientation with implications for logistics management research and practice [5]. Customer knowledge is developed from various positions and with multiple possibilities. Two possibilities uncovered by our empirical material are the customer–order assemblage and the cost–volume assemblage. In the supply chain case that we have discussed, there might be further dynamics involved and additional complexity, but still the qualification of the customer evolved as in the cases related by Cuganesan [16] and Vaivio [17]. in response to which assemblage was being invoked and the position of the actor in the supply chain. Identifying competing customer representations and accompanied practices is a concern for integrated supply chains.

In Cuganesan’s [16] customer intimacy example, a ‘numeric calculation network’ used accounting numbers to calculate, and impose upon the sales force, a regime of performance measurement for customer intimacy. A ‘sales calculation network’ destabilized the proposed performance measures by promoting its own implicit basis for calculating customers through co-location and proximity to named customers. Based on the material from customer-ordered production, the ‘numeric calculation network’ was enforced by, among others, the owners. The quantification decontextualized and made possible (even though some claimed, not meaningfully) the transfer into different versions of the customer. On the other hand, space delimited the possible transfer of the transformation of the ‘sales calculation network’. The networks might align with each other but are necessarily not predisposed to do so [44]. Different theories and versions of the customer might counteract each other in some cases. A decrease in operational performance in a supply chain might indicate a change in customer knowledge in another of the existing theories of customer orientation of the supply chain. It would then be important to connect with different versions of the customer, i.e., involving both the ‘numeric’ and the ‘sales calculation network’.

The success or failure of assemblages relates to its sequence of trial and error, reconfigurations and reformulations [46,59]. Customer-ordered production is a programmatic statement that mobilizes an assemblage of devices and actions to perform a particular version of ‘customer orientation’. But, as we have shown, the version of the customer that fitted the customer–order assemblage was soon contrasted with a rather different view of the customer that underpinned the cost–volume assemblage. The two assemblages made use of the same supply chain’s actors and resources even though their versions of the customer were radically different and envisaged quite different roles for the actors involved, namely the dealers. Callon [46] proposes that there is a symmetry between agencements as both involve material, textual, procedural, and other investments. Actors that take part in multiple assemblages change equipment as they move assemblage. Assemblages that appear to be opposing each other are often mutually interwoven and share constituent elements. Customer orientation and cost/volume orientation are two such assemblages that were found to be tightly interwoven in the customer-ordered production system at Volvo Cars.

The practice of customer orientation (as any other assemblage) has a particular trajectory; ongoing representations, actions, and entities are intertwined in constructing versions of the customer. Customer statements are based on lived experience, theories, and models coming from both academic and lay sources. These statements are actively engaged in constituting the reality that is performed. Statements and their worlds are thus related in socio-technical assemblages, i.e., a combination of heterogeneous elements that have been adjusted to one another [46]. Over time, these intertwined entities might converge or diverge, and their alignment might prove to be problematic [60].

6. Conclusions and Further Research

Drawing on the notions of performativity and multiplicity, this paper has extended the customer concept in marketing and logistics theory. The benefits of this approach in situations where multiple versions of the customer encounter each other does not necessarily lead to a combination or juxtaposition of these versions but to a deeper understanding of performances and possibilities of multiple versions to coexist [12].

Using a constructivist methodology, we have argued that the concept of customer orientation is in need to be understood in its complexity (in line [8]). In this paper, we have tried to break down the prevailing methodological rigidity and problematized the assumptions that underpin the concept of customer orientation of the market orientation literature, in order to examine the nature of customer representations. We argue that the ambiguity and multiplicity surrounding the notion of customers as management objects need to be accounted for, in order to improve our understanding of what it means to be customer-centric. Customer orientation as a managerial technology has a causal relationship to performance but in a more ambiguous way than is used in market orientation literature. Our aim has been to offer an empirically based understanding of customer orientation practice that explains the customer multiple, which is in sharp contrast to the common cross-sectional surveys of customer orientation [23,28].

Our purpose has been to study first what constitutes customer orientation and second how the customer is represented in different parts in the supply chain and how these multiple meanings are aligned by the focal firms’ supply chain strategy.

The customer multiple involves practices that are both tension and aligned with each other. With this approach, it is possible to understand how customer orientation was put into practice in an automotive supply chain. The figure of the customer is produced and circulated through the interactions of many actors. This reorientation of the concept of customer orientation is informed by explorations of the customer in management accounting literature and developed by understanding of multiple ways of coordinating customer orientation that works across multiple supply chain practices. Our study illustrates how customer orientation is practiced in a supply chain where versions of customers coexist and overlap, leading to different outcomes.

Our study contributes to knowledge of practical coordination that is used to manage the performance of multiple versions of the customer [12]. The findings contribute by showing how two different assemblages are built and developed. The customer has been given a special status in the customer-ordered-production strategy that governs Volvo Cars’ supply chain. Over time, the incomplete and fragile rationalization of the customer became too diffuse to be shared by the actors involved in the supply chain. Customers, dealers, and manufacturers, among others, aligned the realization of possibilities to reduce costs and risks together with higher sales prices. Over time, the customer became an ambivalent object as it needed to fit a cost–volume as well as a customer–order assemblage. Reduced costs and increased volume became necessary and this shifted priorities based on position in the supply chain. For example, the process of quantification involved incentives for the number of cars sold per period that hardly related to the vision of the customer in the customer–order assemblage. A new assemblage had been initiated, a cost–volume assemblage that competed with the customer–order assemblage for tools and resources. The implication is that the customer is more than the bounded and singular whole described by the customer-centricity literature. On the contrary, customer representations turned out to be partial, multiple, incoherent, and inconsistent as defined by different actors in the supply chain. The enacted customer is a customer multiple.

Knowledge of the practical coordination of the multiple customer representations in a supply chain contributes with relevance for customer orientation literature to practice [11], via understanding of the particular arrangements of practices through which customer orientation is enacted, rather than of the concept’s essential qualities [12]. The customer, as an object, was a part in both the customer–order assemblage and the cost–volume assemblage. A proposition that follows from the multiplicity approach is that customer orientation needs to be understood not as a conceptual representation as described in marketing management literature, but also as a representation that performs work, i.e., in customer-oriented practices [13].

The second and final part of the conclusion relates to how the customer is represented in different parts in the supply chain and how these multiple meanings are aligned by the focal firms’ supply chain strategy. Interpretation of involved actors’ views of the customer provided insights on two phases of customer-ordered production and a controversy of the customer interpreted in a customer-orientation or cost–volume assemblage. How can customer orientation be enacted taking the complexity we have illustrated into account? Customer-centric prescriptions seldom acknowledge the potential for multiple assemblages to coexist or even undermine each other, as our supply chain example demonstrates. Still, it is reasonable to assume that complexity and multiplicity pervade most efforts at enacting customer orientation. Strategic objectives, such as customer orientation, are represented in different ways within an organization and often enough beyond its boundaries as the organization attempts to influence its network partners. The biography of a conceptual management object such as ‘the customer’ is a study of the social life of a strategic object as it travels through multiple and diverse constituencies. The biographical method follows the objects, ‘…for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories’ (p. 5, [58]), in order to understand what they are and what they are doing in assemblages of customer orientation and cost/volume orientation. In the analysis of these trajectories, we can interpret the complexity and dynamics that add up comfortably or stand up in tension or both [21]. The career of the object in combination with management technologies defines possibilities of alignment. In this way, we propose that customer orientation, by nature, follows from sequences of supply chain processes in which the customer object depends on situated knowledge and representations that bring about their existence and impacts the logic of action.

The practical implication of this study is that there are no easy fixes that once and for all implement customer orientation. Customer knowledge and the processes that make up this knowledge inhabit different supply chain positions. Customer orientation seems to be found in a process of learning with, rather than learning from, others in the supply chain, including the customer. There will always be competing notions about the customer and how it should be represented, and the mutual adjustment between these different notions is likely to be more durable in some periods than others. A strategy such as customer-ordered production is continuously in-the-making. Therefore, customer orientation might be managed by making simplifications of different customer objects explicit and coordinating these over time [39].

We have explained multiple versions of the customer based on multiplicity and denoted the customer multiple. This constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity to further investigate customer orientation by a fine-grained analysis on the basis of practices rather than the object of the customer.

Managerial Implications

The findings of this study suggest that logistics and supply chain managers should not assume a singular or stable understanding of the customer across the supply chain. Instead, they should recognize that multiple, and sometimes conflicting, representations of the customer coexist and influence decision making at different organizational levels. These representations are shaped by actors’ positions, incentives, and operational constraints.

To manage this complexity, managers can benefit from, for example:

Making customer representations explicit: Encourage supply chain actors to articulate how they define and prioritize, and enact the customer in their specific context. This can surface hidden assumptions and enable more informed coordination.

Facilitating cross-functional dialog: Create structured opportunities for actors across departments (e.g., sales, logistics, production) to align their interpretations of customer needs and expectations in ongoing strategic developments.

Accepting and working with multiplicity: Rather than striving for full coherence, managers can focus on managing tensions productively—e.g., by balancing cost–volume logics with customer–order logics through adaptive planning and flexible resource allocation.

Viewing customer orientation as a process: Recognize that customer orientation is not a one-time implementation, but an ongoing negotiation that evolves with market conditions, internal priorities, and supply chain dynamics.

By approaching customer orientation as a dynamic and situated practice, managers can better navigate the operational realities of modern supply chains and avoid the pitfalls of overly simplified, one-size-fits-all strategies.