Corporate Mission and Vision and Customer Knowledge Management for Increasing Competitive Advantages

Customer knowledge is highly valued in today’s business environment where supply is more than demand and firms are trying their best to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Building customer knowledge base through knowledge management provides firms with strategic weapon for customer value creation, average level of customer knowledge enhancement, cost and time reduction, service quality improvement and quicker customer knowledge creation. The main objective of this study is to propose a conceptual framework for exploring the relatedness of the three dimensions: resource provision, knowledge management process and customer knowledge performance. The proposed conceptual framework emphasizes the link between knowledge management with corporate mission and vision and that they set out the direction of corporate knowledge management. This study takes a kitchenware manufacturer and seller in Taiwan as an example to perform a field study to collect the concerned data for exploring the expressed relatedness among the three dimensions of the proposed framework as reported by the respondents in the case company. From the responses of the surveyed case company, it is also demonstrated how customer knowledge can be enhanced through resource provision and knowledge management and that people who surely understand their corporate mission and vision can outperform in knowledge management process and in customer knowledge performance compared with people who do not in this particular setting.