تاثیر برتری محصول بر رضایت مشتری در مدیریت پروژه  The impact of product superiority on customer satisfaction in project management

1. Introduction The importance of customer satisfaction in product and service industries is known to be vital for a firm’s success in today’s competitive marketplace in business-to-business marketing (Austen et al., 2012; Homburg and Rudolph, 2001). Customer satisfaction is determined by a number of factors including a consumer’s determination in purchasing a product, their social bond with the organization and the connection created on a personal level in the industrial markets (Abdul-Muhmin, 2005; Tikkanen and Alajoutsijärvi, 2002). It has also been shown in multiple studies that one of the main reasons a new product succeeds in the marketplace is due to product superiority (Flint et al., 2011; Slater et al., 2014). Product superiority can be defined as the differentiation in characteristics found between similar products that leads to one product being perceived to be of higher value and/or quality to the customer both in consumer (Kotler et al., 2013) and industrial contexts (Flint et al., 2011; Stock et al., 2001). However, product superiority has a different impact when the service resulting in the end product is also a part of the customer’s satisfaction assessment (Rushton and Carson, 1985). The service and product aspects are interrelated and are thus frequently present in the project management context. The service part includes the start and end times of the project, and includes a number of different phases (Garrison et al., 2012), while the physical product is the end installation outlined in the customer’s contract (Maloney, 2002). The manager of the project must keep his or her crew within the budgeted costs and planned time frames set out in the proposal for the customer (Maloney, 2002; Yaghootkar and Gil, 2012). If the goals of installation and budget are met the question then is, is the customer satisfied due to the product superiority? How does this impact the customer’s satisfaction with the project’s management? In other words does product superiority have a direct impact on customer satisfaction or does product superiority just strengthen the relationship between project management stages and customer satisfaction, or maybe both are happening at the same time?