JBIM special issue on CBIM 2011 workshop

Citation

Biggemann, T.B.-A.a.S. (2014), "JBIM special issue on CBIM 2011 workshop", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 29 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-08-2013-0160

JBIM special issue on CBIM 2011 workshop

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Volume 29, Issue 4

This special issue of the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing is based on the papers presented at the annual CBIM Academic Workshop held in Puerto Rico in 2011. It includes eight contributions that create a collection of frameworks developed from case studies or conceptual work that expand the knowledge frontier of business-to-business marketing. The studies look at a variety of topics including supply chain performance, innovation, small enterprises in emerging markets, critical waves in relationship, service modularization, relationship marketing, and sustainability.

Madhavaram, Granot, and Badrinarayanan, in their paper “Relationship marketing strategy: an operant resource perspective,” provide new insights into the important role of operant resources in relationship marketing strategy success. The authors review the relationship marketing literature for operant resources as defined in the service-dominant logic. Their review finds various empirically supported resources and they also present other potential operant resources yet untested. This new perspective of the role of operant resources provides interesting opportunities to extend the literature.

Edvardsson, Kowalkowski, Strandvik, and Voima, in their paper “Negative critical waves in business relationships: an extension of the critical incident perspective,” provide insight into an understudied area in business-to-business relationships by looking at unexpected disturbances they describe as ‘negative critical waves’. Their qualitative study with Swedish and Finnish companies focuses on multiple phases of these disturbances and provide a framework to classify disturbances. A critical finding is the linkage between these critical incidents and how they are linked to other relational factors both internally and externally.

Todd, Javalgi, and Grossman, in their conceptual paper “Understanding the characteristics of the growth of SMEs in B-to-B markets in emerging economies: an organizational ecology approach,” focus on SMEs in emerging economies using an organizational ecology framework. The focus on growth drivers within this framework is applied to B2B firms in India and China. This study’s integration of ecological models, emerging markets, and SMEs challenges extends the literature and develops new perspectives and implications for future research and management of the complex B2B relationships in emerging markets.

Biggemann, Williams, and Kro, in their paper “Building in sustainability, social responsibility and value co-creation,” provide insight on role of social responsibility programs in value creation. The focus is on stakeholders’ participation in the processes of designing and selection of social responsibility programs, so that transparency is maximized and trust can be built with the lasting benefits of co-creation of value. This paper finds that sustainability is built with the participation of many interconnected entities, such as suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, or more generally stakeholders whose actions are fostered by social responsibility that fuels the pride, trust, and consistency of the members of the value chain. A recurrent data-grounded theme of value in its al forms –functional, hedonic, symbolic and financial- becomes apparent in this research in relation to business sustainability. A virtual circle between value co-creation and a project’s perception of value derives from integrity. Integrity makes the company boundaries less sharp, and thus increases the parties’ ownership of the outcomes that the operations of the company deliver.

Carlborg and Kindström, in their paper “Service process modularization and modular strategies,” provide insights into service efficiency and the active/passive role of customer characteristics in success of service modularity. The multiple case study of Swedish firms highlights role of service modularity in developing and deploying efficient services and the need to recognize customer-specific activities, resources and competencies as pivotal parts of the modular service processes. In their analysis, the authors differentiate various service types and their distinct demand and resources.

Makkonen and Johnston, in their conceptual paper “Innovation adoption and diffusion in business-to-business marketing,” address key gaps in the current knowledge of organizational innovation adoption within business-to-business marketing. They provide an overview and synthesis of the literature to include individual-level actions, combined with industrial network concepts in a new conceptualization of organizational buying behavior and adoption of innovation. The contribution of the proposed conceptual model lies in its capacity to take into account individual-level organizational behavior actions that underpin the adoption process and relate this intra-firm behavior to its wider network context. The new conceptualization expands to a system-level account and a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of adoption.

Chelariu, Asare, and Brashear-Alejandro, in their conceptual paper “‘A ROSE, by any other name’…: relationship typology and performance measurement in supply chains,” expand the dimensions of supply chain performance measures. Based on a review the literature regarding inter-organizational performance from multiple areas including: supply chain management, logistics and marketing, the authors find that most research focuses primarily on operational and economic performance measures while paying less attention to relational and strategic performance measures. They expand the performance framework into four major categories of supply chain performance measures: Relational; Operational; Strategic; and Economic – hence, the name ROSE. The paper also offers directions for future work in the form of propositions and note that this extended provides a more comprehensive model of supply chain management performance as a guiding framework by both academics and practitioners.

Aarikka-Stenroos and Makkonen, in their paper “Industrial buyers’ use of references, word-of-mouth and reputation in complex buying situation,” present an extensive exploratory qualitative study that analyses complex buying processes including information items, information gathering and information use of buyers. The multi-case study follows buyers of knowledge intensive services and technology across eight separate cases. The primary findings identify the different roles of references, word-of-mouth, collegial advice networks, and reputation, and suggest that experience-based information provides information on offerings, suppliers and the problem solving situation in complex buying per se. The article’s contribution is to provide a framework depicting the employment of experience-based information in complex buying, which ensues through focal and continuous buying processes. Insights from this research are broadly applicable to the contexts of knowledge intensive, innovation and solutions business.

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editors would like to thank all CBIM Workshop participants, Professor Wesley Johnston, the CBIM Executive Director and the authors and reviewers of this special issue for the hard work and long hours spent both advising and improving these manuscripts.

Thomas Brashear-Alejandro and, Sergio Biggemann
Guest Editors