تاثیر برون سپاری بر بازاریابی کسب و کار برای کسب و کار : یک برنامه برای تحقیق

Increasing globalization has made companies focus more on their outsourcing decisions. Moving beyond the tactical companies have begun to incorporate outsourcing as a strategic weapon in their armory. This article expands on this theme by highlighting the need for understanding this key issue from business marketing and sales perspective and pointing to some interesting research issues on the topic. The article also introduces this special issue, briefly discusses the six special issue articles and provides a framework that integrates their contributions to our understanding of strategic outsourcing.

Since the last two decades, organizations have sought to enhance efficiencies and expand their capabilities by giving larger role to their suppliers in creating and delivering value to their end customers (Liker and Choi, 2004). Moving beyond the traditional ‘make’ or ‘buy’ decisions, companies sought to view their vendors as partners that signaled a shift from adversarial arms length relationships to deeper cooperative relationships. Many scholars have captured this phenomenon both here in North America and in Europe where the IMP Group focused much of its research on this new paradigm using a network approach. Business marketers also readily embraced shift in buyer perspective by investing in long-term buyer–seller relationships. Much of the focus in researching buyer–seller relationships has focused on the logic, choice of partner, and governance issues related to such partnerships. We view outsourcing as a practice by which an organization seeks outside vendors to perform a set of discrete activities that support its core business mission. Outsourcing tends to cover a broad rubric of organizational activities that include core activities such as new product development (e.g. Sun Java) and supportive, but crucial organizational activities such as IT infrastructure development, maintenance, and support, and peripheral activities such as training, payroll, accounting, data entry etc. Importance of outsourcing to businesses has been long recognized by practitioners. In the academic domain outsourcing has been examined mainly by scholars in management discipline using a range of management theories and in marketing, it has been highlighted in specific activities such as new product development (Carson, 2007), sales and marketing function (McGovern and Quelch, 2005). Against this backdrop, in this special issue of Industrial Marketing Management on ‘Impact of Outsourcing on Business Marketing Strategy’, we spotlight an important trend of this new millennium, outsourcing, on business marketing. In this paper we provide a brief overview on the five articles that appear in this special issue and set up a research agenda for future work on this topic. We hope you find these stimulating articles interesting and thought provoking.