توسعه تئوری بازاریابی B2B

Despite the practice of B2B marketing dating back several thousand years, B2B marketing studies did not exist in significant numbers prior to the last three decades and we are now in the a stage of accelerated theory development. Contributions to B2B theory began at the end of the 1800s and in the early 1900s, but developments in the last decades have inspired this paper to study how the B2B marketing theory has evolved. The transition from an economic foundation to one built on the behavioral sciences and the recent wider applicability of B2B marketing theory towards other marketing fields is viewed in this paper as an exciting journey and is the focus of this paper. A historic development of the contributions reveals new knowledge on B2B research development and its applicability which is beneficial not only for researchers in B2B marketing research and industrial firms, but also other marketing fields.

Commerce between organizations has been around since organizations were first developed. And of course this means that B2B marketing has also existed for millennia. While the study of Business to Business (B2B) marketing can be traced back to the 1890s, significant contributions to (B2B) marketing theory have only been made during the last three decades. Research of B2B marketing was silent over a long period of time, and our understanding of it was based on implicit, individualized, and experiential based on the behavior of businessmen (Hadjikhani & LaPlaca, 2012); it existed in society but had little scientific identity or inquiry. It took several centuries before business relationships gained a specific focus of scientific inquiry (Carratu, 1987 and Sheth et al., 1988). Since then the field has undergone significant development and impressive change. But still, as demonstrated by LaPlaca and Katrichis (2009), was severely underrepresented in scientific marketing research. When reviewing 900 articles published over a twenty-four year period in Industrial Marketing Management, LaPlaca (1997) showed that while there has been a significant increase in B2B relationships articles, articles on topics such as segmentation and sales management dominated the published literature in this field. The increasing research attention towards B2B has also been demonstrated by Johnston and Lewin (1997) in their analysis of 10 years of publications in the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. Following the development of B2B as a subset of general marketing theory, this paper will look at the development of B2B marketing as it evolved from a primarily economic perspective to one encompassing behavioral theories. Behavioral science contributions to B2B beginning at the end of the 1800s and in the early 1900s, and more explicitly in the last three decades have transformed how we think of B2B marketing and have enabled us to apply marketing theory to an ever increasing variety of interorganizational buying situations. The development from economic to behavioral science and the recent wider applicability of B2B towards other marketing fields such as service marketing and e-business is conceived in this paper as an exciting journey capturing the focus of this paper. A historic development of the contributions may reveal new knowledge on its applicability which is beneficial not only for industrial firms, but also other marketing fields.

Our journey started several thousand years back, paused briefly in the 1890s, and has now arrived at the present. The theoretical views developed in the 1890s and early in the 1900s did not immediately launch the field of B2B marketing, but it was at least several decades before B2B marketing theory gained renewed research interest. This was achieved by shifting from economic theory towards behavioral theory to investigate industrial marketing behavior. The inability of economic theory to fully explain business realities permitted a new group of B2B researchers to flourish. The field gained strength when researchers highlighted the serious problems in the theoretical foundations in economic exchange theory applied to modern B2B realities. At first these researchers borrowed heavily from consumer behaviorist, but when differences between consumer and business markets proved difficult to overcome, these B2B researchers looked for new bases of understanding. While B2B marketing has had a tough development so far, we can honestly conclude that the B2B journey has just started. Marketing management theory has dominated marketing research for decades despite the fact that there is no evidence of the its appropriateness. There are even followers that can bear witness to the damage caused by high costs of like advertising and other means of market communication yielding far less than the anticipated effects on sale figures. Recently we have seen a diminishing role and impact of Chief Marketing Officers (and by default of marketing in general) while at the same time an increasing need for the marketing function to improve its effectiveness and efficiency (Wiersema, in press). We have witnessed the significant costs of marketing tools which are paid by the society, customers and firms with very low specific gains. The view that firms know what they want, can handle their environment, and are able to manipulate consumers for their short term benefit raised substantial criticism from B2B research groups. For the ultimate aim of marketing management thoughts- to come closer to the real business life and marketing managers — there is very limited evidence on the exact contribution of the theories developed in this theme. Rather, the shortcomings in both theoretical foundation and in the fulfillment of the managerial goal are noticeable. The progress in B2B research is still young and there is much left to discover. As we have discussed, B2B theory has undergone several changes in its fundamental basis. Now we may state that the development forming an overall B2B marketing theory has had an evolutionary process, but that it also contains turbulent transitions with emphasis shifting from on one theoretical base to another. Various theories have been initially welcomed and then viewed askance when unable to satisfactorily explain new or varied B2B experiences. While B2B research in its early stage puts the perceptual boundary around stability or smooth change (a kind of harmony in resources interdependency and exchange), more recent researchers have extended the view in depth, width and time. Depth refers to research studies with deep theoretical foundations imbedded in various behavioral sciences; width extends the study to incorporate actors and relationships beside the primary business relationship under investigation to look at their impact on the primary actors. The time dimension looks at the birth, tenure and dissolution of the relationship. Study of these three dimensions requires new analytical tools and research approaches. The width conjectures to the recent studies on exploring relationships belonging to a “system.” New studies widening the interaction perspective to the network view has led some to extend the industrial network to include other firms and actors into the network. The term “business network” in lieu of “industrial network” takes into the field of study non-primary organizations that facilitate, regulate or otherwise impact how the primary network functions and how it achieves its goals. This broadening has increased the applicability of B2B to other contexts such as sports networks, religious networks or regional governmental networks. Further, deeper reflection on behavioral concepts has led to the development of new research fields that aid better understanding of business realities. It can also be concluded that the research in B2B during the last two decades has taken diversified, heterogeneous but interconnected directions. Clearly no one approach will explain all aspects of B2B marketing nor can one approach predict outcomes of interorganizational interactions. The journey will be more troublesome if researchers adhere solely to their own theoretical foundations and avoid coexistence and matching. Instead of conflicting and disparaging remarks of other views, there is a real need for discussions and views on complementarities. Naturally, the B2B research theme is limited by the empirical and analytical boundaries of its researchers. Early researchers were bounded by their training in economics and applied economic tools to their studies. However, the theories developed by these researchers did could not fully explain real observations and soon other perspectives were sought. Management theories were applied to the investigation but they too could not fully explain B2B behavior. Investigations that were based on stability and harmony in relationships have been supplemented by studies involving instability, disharmony, conflicts and the role of negative relationships. We have gained some knowledge from Wanamaker's initial thoughts as to where to place relationship and conceptual boundaries. On the base of business realities he included all actors, no matter if they were industrial, consumers or politicians bounded with behavioral concepts and relationship economy. A relevant unanswered question remains: where can the researchers put the empirical and theoretical boundary which can enable the researchers to perform a deep analysis, testing for generalization and explicit managerial implications? For example, arguing only on the behavioral ground will exclude insights that can be derived from the economic perspective and will thus come short in its explanation of business relationship, and vice versa. It can be concluded that there are still implicit and tacit problems in issues such as ‘relationship is the end or is the mean’. While in one perspective there are no network foci and the network itself is viewed as the entity under investigation, other perspectives view the concept of ‘focality’ as a major concern and place greater research emphasis on investigation of network components as the focal point of network research and relationship expectation, knowledge, strategy and aim. This paper does not have the intention to hold or reject one perspective over the other. But explicit awareness and treatment of relationship can enrich and further increase the understanding of B2B research. Generally this review discloses the problem and requests researchers to devote some time discussing the underlying issue of “What is a relationship?”