Business-to-business marketing in the 21st century

Citation

Garry, T., Melewar, T.C. and Tiu Wright, L. (2010), "Business-to-business marketing in the 21st century", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 25 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2010.08025eaa.001

Business-to-business marketing in the 21st century

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Volume 25, Issue 5

All the articles comprising this special edition of the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing were originally presented at the Academy of Marketing’s Business-to-business Special Interest Group Masterclass held at Leicester Business School, De Montfort University. Entitled “Business-to-business in the 21st century”, the Masterclass provided a platform for both practitioner and academic experts in the field of business-to-business marketing to present and discuss emerging and contemporary challenges facing marketers within such contexts. This edition is made up of a selection of papers submitted from the Masterclass and put through a journal review process. They reflect the diverse range of conceptual and contextual issues encompassed within the business-to-business arena.

In the first paper, Broderick, Garry and Beasley explore current management attitudes towards benchmarking, implementations and embeddedness within small business-to-business service firms. Focusing on architectural services, their findings demonstrate significant variations in the receptiveness of small firms towards the adoption of benchmarking. They suggest less “cumbersome” measurement models maybe appropriate to allow organically growing firms within such contexts to apply benchmarking and quality ideas flexibly.

Moving from a high skills’ service context to a low skills’ service context, Jayawardhena examines the impact of service encounter quality and offers interesting insights into its relationship with customer satisfaction, service quality perceptions and loyalty. His findings demonstrate how careful and creative management of the service encounter can contribute towards the achievement of organisational planning and objectives such as resource allocation to improve firm performance.

Taking a strategic perspective, Piercy reviews changes in the way business-to-business companies are responding to customer and market pressure for higher service and relational investments and the accompanying need for new capabilities in managing the business risk within company portfolios. Highlighting how “the challenge has moved from sales and selling into strategic customer management”, Piercy proposes a model which provides a framework for executive consideration of the strategic sales issue. The model considers both the evaluation of the strategic role and the performance of the existing sales and account structures as well as the design of new roles for delivering competitive strength in the future.

In their paper, Gruber, Henneberg, Ashnai, Naudé and Reppel examine issues pertaining to effective complaint management handling within business-to-business relationships and the motivations that drive purchasing organisations to complain. Their adoption of a qualitative laddering technique provides valuable insights suggesting if an organisation is quick to respond to such complaints there are positive consequences in terms of achieving a solution and preventing future problems with effective handling of resolution conflicts resulting in financial benefits for the organisation.

Kooli, Wright and Wright provide an international dimension to marketing within business-to-business contexts. Focusing on the evolutionary attributes of alliance life cycles, their paper examines issues of exposure resulting from market competition faced by manufacturing subcontractors in less developed countries when attempting to access European markets. Conducting their research within the Tunisian clothing and textile industry, these authors demonstrate that the life cycle stages of subcontracting firms mirror Schumpeter’s creation and destruction cycle of innovation suggesting that firms could learn marketing competencies in innovative processes from such relationships. The paper attempts to present a contribution to the marketing literature which is limited with regard to the market lifecycle of alliance relationships.

In his conceptual paper, McDonald reviews issues surrounding marketing accountability and its antecedents in related domains such as strategy and finance. The results of this review suggest that within business-to-business contexts in particular, there is a “clamour” for more structure and guidance in the area of marketing accountability. McDonald attempts to rectify this situation by proposing the “Marketing due diligence model”. By incorporating three distinct levels for measuring market effectiveness (shareholder value added, linking activities and attitudes to outcomes and micro measurement) McDonald sets “a research agenda for scholars in finance, microeconomics or marketing”.

In the final paper, Gupta, Melewar and Bourlakis provide an interesting insight into the links between branding, relationship marketing and purchase intention within a business-to-business context. More specifically, they focus on the contribution of the brand personified as being representative of the brand and the consequences of this on the brand knowledge of resellers. Their findings suggest that the brand personified with its metaphorical properties enables resellers to clearly understand brand information and to make positive evaluations about the brand.

This special issue draws on a diverse range of concepts, contexts and methodological issues surrounding contemporary topics within the field of business-to-business marketing. We thank the JBIM Editor for giving us this opportunity and the reviewers for their help in reviewing for this special issue. We hope this provides an appropriate stimulus for future research and discussion within this field in the twenty-first century and beyond!

Tony GarryUniversity of Canterbury, Christchurch, New ZealandT.C. MelewarZurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, SwitzerlandLen Tiu WrightDe Montfort University, Leicester, UK