As the oldest academic journal in marketing, Journal of Retailing publishes research dealing with all sorts of B2B and B2C retailing-related topics. However, there appears to be a perception that Journal of Retailing welcomes only research pertaining to B2C issues. In this article, we debunk that perception through an analysis of the content of Journal of Retailing articles published during the 2002–2008 period. In particular, we find that only 18.7% of Journal of Retailing's content is devoted exclusively to B2C or C2C (consumer-to-consumer) topics. The remainder focuses on B2B research issues. We explore the implications of these findings for researchers who wish to pursue retailing-related B2B research.
Conventional wisdom has it that B2B marketing and B2C marketing are two distinct entities, and never the twain shall meet. Championing this dichotomy are academic journals specifically devoted to B2B (alternatively, read “industrial marketing”) or B2C (alternative label being “consumer marketing”) domains (e.g., Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology), academic scholarly sub-groups (e.g., ISBM, ACR), and of course a whole host of textbooks devoted to business versus consumer marketing. The purpose of this polemic is to argue the following points:
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First, that the B2B versus B2C divide is an obsolete concept.
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Second, it is difficult to isolate pure B2B or pure B2C research in business.
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Third, the field of retailing straddles and actually brings these two together.
B2B versus B2C divide is obsolete
During the 1980s and early 1990s while the field of marketing was engaged in a soul-searching introspective debate involving philosophy of science prescriptions (cf., Anderson, 1983, Bazozzi, 1984, Hunt, 1990 and Peter, 1992), Fern and Brown (1984) advanced another heretical idea in their article titled “The Industrial/Consumer Marketing Dichotomy: A Case of Insufficient Justification.” In summary, they argued (page 75):
… [T]o date the observed differences between industrial and consumer marketing (1) have not been causally related to marketing practice or theory formulation, (2) have not been tested empirically, and (3) have not been justified on logical grounds. In short, the purported differences have not played an instrumental role in the development of marketing thought.
The wisdom of this early prognosis is now being supported by at least three streams of research in contemporary marketing thought: (1) the emergence of the Supply Chain Management (SCM)2 perspective to managing businesses amply demonstrates that this B2B and B2C division is artificial (cf. Brown et al. 2005); (2) the nascent service-dominant logic3 being advanced by Vargo and Lusch, 2004 and Vargo and Lusch, 2006 and their colleagues (e.g., Lengnick-Hall 1996; Lusch, Vargo, and O’Brien 2007) which entails the co-production of the creation of value by including consumers into process; and (3) the increasingly noteworthy marriage of ostensibly consumer behavior and interpersonal constructs like attribution, personality, trust, and commitment into B2B contexts.4
Our review of the content of the Journal of Retailing during the period 2002–2008 reinforces our assertion that Journal of Retailing is indeed a broad-based outlet for marketing research related to retailing topics ( Brown and Dant 2006). As Table 1 and Table 2 show, Journal of Retailing is not solely restricted to (or even focused on) the B2C research domain. Rather, retailing-related investigations in the C2C and B2B domains also find a welcome home at Journal of Retailing. Indeed, Table 2 shows a number of retailing-related B2B research areas that would benefit from additional attention. Included in this list are (1) global retailing; (2) the retailing implications of innovation and new product development; (3) marketing research in retailing; and (4) the retailing of services. In addition to being an outlet for retailing-related B2B research (as well as C2C and B2C investigations), the Journal of Retailing is also an important resource for researchers seeking background literature and conceptual insights on B2B issues, as well as C2C and B2C topics.
