روش های آلمانی برای تئوری بازاریابی کسب و کار برای کسب و کار: ریشه و ساختار

The development of marketing as a discipline shows some differences between the US-dominated mainstream and theory emerging from Germany — particularly in the field of business-to-business marketing. Contemporary marketing thinking in this area in Germany is founded largely on institutional economics, with property rights theory, transaction cost economics (TCE), agency theory (AT) and information economics playing supporting roles. Based on these theories a ‘leistungs’ or ‘value’ approach has developed that permits the integration of concepts such as process thinking and services orientation in marketing with these other theories. An extended view of the system of marketing management is described that reveals new areas for marketing research and analysis in business-to-business marketing. The English word ‘marketing’ has been adopted without translation in most countries. This is because the establishment as well as much of the development of marketing as a modern scholarly and scientific endeavour in the 20th century took place in the US (Sheth et al., 1988). Yet it is inappropriate to ignore the existence of other marketing communities. Many of these have developed a life of their own, independent to a certain extent from mainstream (North American) marketing thinking, and have alternative and interesting perspectives to contribute to the development of marketing thought. Such local, regional or national communities have been characterized as ‘black holes’ in marketing thinking. Black holes are astronomical objects absorbing all material coming too close but never giving back anything. This is a suitable metaphor for non-English-based marketing communities, in that, nowadays, many of these researchers are able to read English but hesitate to publish in English. An indication of this is that most marketing publications in languages other than English contain many references to English sources while English publications seldom refer to any non-English sources. This article sheds some light on the nature and contribution of a German “black hole.” First, we provide a short description of its historical development. We then focus on one area of thought that has not been developed to a great extent, we believe, elsewhere, i.e. business-to-business marketing theory based on institutional economics. We discuss the contributions made by the German approach and its areas of application.