{"id":8973,"date":"2012-02-27T22:49:53","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T22:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/business.cornell.edu\/centers\/2012\/02\/27\/johnson-s-chen-guides-mercedes-benz-china-in-selling-value-not-price\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T18:18:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T18:18:46","slug":"johnson-s-chen-guides-mercedes-benz-china-in-selling-value-not-price","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/business.cornell.edu\/centers\/2012\/02\/27\/johnson-s-chen-guides-mercedes-benz-china-in-selling-value-not-price\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnson\u2019s Chen Guides Mercedes-Benz China in Selling Value, Not Price"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head>\n<\/head><body><p>In her address to more than 2,000 top managers and sales people in Shanghai, Ya-Ru Chen shares principles of trust building and collaborative negotiation<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\">\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"130\" height=\"75\" src=\"https:\/\/business.cornell.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/06\/hili_Ya-Ru-Chen-preferred.jpg\" alt=\"Johnson&rsquo;s Chen Guides Mercedes-Benz China in Selling Value, Not Price\" class=\"wp-image-8974\"><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Johnson at Cornell University&rsquo;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.johnson.cornell.edu\/Faculty-And-Research\/Profile.aspx?id=yc659\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"external\">Ya-Ru Chen<\/a> gave a guest speech to more than 2,000 sales people of Mercedes-Benz at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai on February 27, 2012. The 2012 Mercedes-Benz Sales Event is a conference for top management, including the automaker&rsquo;s China CEO and sales professionals from all its dealerships across China. Chen, the Nicholas H. Noyes Professor of Management, is also co-director of Johnson&rsquo;s <a href=\"\/centers\/emerging-markets-institute\/\">Emerging Markets Institute<\/a> and faculty director of China Executive Education Programs. Chen is an expert on cross-cultural differences and similarities in employees&rsquo; behaviors and attitudes. Her recent work explores how people in different cultures attain, maintain, and experience status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Chen&rsquo;s talk, titled &ldquo;Selling Value as Opposed to Selling Price,&rdquo; incorporated social psychological principles on trust building and influence, at both individual and network levels, and negotiation, to help inform the luxury automaker&nbsp; in its continued sales growth in Mainland China. On January 8, 2012, Mercedes-Benz China announced record sales in December 2011, of 23,230 units, as well as record annual sales, with 198,520, a 35 percent increase over the previous year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Chen defined &ldquo;value&rdquo; for the audience as &ldquo;benefits, less price.&rdquo;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&ldquo;The value a company generates for its customers is not solely contingent upon providing a low price,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Just as important in the equation are the perceived benefits their customers believe they achieve.&rdquo;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perceived benefits and price are always compared against what competitors offer across both dimensions, Chen says. So in a competitive market, such as China&rsquo;s, it is important for a company to have the full knowledge of competitive points of difference. With that knowledge in place as a standard &ldquo;tool kit,&rdquo; front-line sales people must identify the needs of each customer, and &ldquo;personalize&rdquo; the benefits of the product to that person.&nbsp; Chen offered the audience techniques for trust building and a framework for collaborative negotiating, to help sellers tailor their approach to the individual customer.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In her address to more than 2,000 top managers and sales people in Shanghai, Ya-Ru Chen shares principles of trust building and collaborative negotiation Johnson at Cornell University&rsquo;s Ya-Ru Chen&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":8974,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[],"class_list":["post-8973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-announcements","organizational_unit-center-for-emerging-markets","organizational_unit-centers-institutes"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.2 (Yoast SEO v28.2) - 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