In recent years, the business model concept has attracted increased attention from scholars in a variety of academic disciplines and areas of professional practice. However, to date, business models have received very little attention from marketing scholars with only eight business model articles having been published in marketing journals between 1970 and 2011. The aim of the paper is first, to analyse the influence of marketing theory on current business model literature; and second, to identify the main research fronts of the business model concept in industrial marketing. Business models offer a way of consolidating and replicating best practice in industry. Further, the business model concept offers the potential for industrial marketers to better tell a story of how value is created in a supply chain. Such stories are of increasing value in a contemporary environment of consumer sensitivity as to how value is delivered to the market. Hence, the value of this study is to identify the areas where assimilation has taken place as a guide for future research within industrial marketing. Further value is derived by identifying areas in which there has been limited assimilation into the marketing discipline and conclusions are drawn as to why such limited assimilation has taken place. Logical conclusions are then advanced as to where future assimilation with industrial marketing needs to take place, and how industrial marketing can make distinctive contributions to the business model literature. To achieve the paper's stated aims, a systematic literature review was conducted. Findings of a review of the business model literature between 1970 and 2011 are presented and a citation analysis used to identify the number of citations a particular article has gained over a period of years in other published research resulting in the identification of the most influential publications and scholars in the business model field.
The structure of this paper is as follows: first a review of some of the leading contributions to the business model field, their definitions and deployment across disciplinary areas is discussed; second a defence and description of the methodology utilised in this paper are presented, in particular, the employment of bibliometric analysis techniques; third the findings from the study are presented; fourth the conclusions and implications drawn from the study are discussed; and finally the methodological limitations of the study are presented.
There are two facets to the main thrust of the findings of this paper. The first is that the marketing discipline has had limited engagement with literature on business models, and second, has had limited influence on the current body of key articles in which business models are discussed. One possible conclusion is therefore that business models have no relevance to the marketing discipline. However, this is not a conclusion advanced in this paper. The rejection of such a negative conclusion is based upon three key factors. First, there seems no natural home for business model literature. This is demonstrated in the above analysis (Table 7) and was also succinctly identified by Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002: 533) when they suggested that business models draw from and integrate “a variety of academic and functional disciplines, gaining prominence in none”. It would appear therefore that with no natural home, a case for theoretical development of business models can be advanced in a number of disciplines. The quantitative identification of the most influential business model articles in the field is therefore helpful in progressing a more qualitative examination of the content of these key articles (detailed in Table 5) for the purpose of building a logical case for such theoretical development to take place within the marketing discipline, and particularly within industrial marketing scholarship. Therefore, the second factor advanced in this paper is to reject the above negative conclusion (and based on the examination of such key articles) is the centrality of value exchange in the discussion of business models. Indeed a major point of consistency in business model literature is that they are involved with the creation, capture and delivery of value (see Section 2). The definition of marketing has evolved over many years from having economic exchange at its heart (for instance in Bartels, 1974) to a broader notion of value exchange, including non-profit situations (for instance in Arndt, 1980) and has more recently moved away from the very notion of exchange in favour of the creation, communication and delivery of value (in the 2004 AMA definition of marketing discussed by Ringold and Weitz (2007) and Sheth and Uslay (2007)). The subsequent updated 2007 version of the AMA definition retains an emphasis on value but further includes explicit reference to clients, partners and society at large (discussed in Gundlach and Wilkie, 2009 and Gundlach and Wilkie, 2010). However, critics persist and cases for further emphasis on stakeholders (Smith, Drumwright, & Gentile, 2010) and a service dominant logic (Gamble, Gilmore, McCartan-Quinn, & Durkan, 2011) in marketing definitions have been advanced. It would seem, therefore, that there is significant synergy in respect of the creation and delivery of value as a core purpose of marketing and a central theme in the business model literature. Indeed, there seems further synergistic recognition of the need to also communicate a business model to key stakeholders. Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart (2010), for example, argued that the purpose of a business model is to communicate strategy whilst Magretta (2002: 88) argued that a business model is a “story” about a firm's strategy. These definitions sit comfortably alongside Ballantyne, Frow, Varey, and Payne's (2011) assertion that value propositions are forms of communication. It therefore seems credible to argue that the creation, delivery and communication of business models should be concerns of the marketing discipline. It is possible, however, to further interrogate discourse in the key business model literature to identify the ways in which industrial marketing in particular has, and can continue to make distinctive contributions to the development of this literature, and indeed the product of this analysis forms the third factor with which we reject the above negative conclusion.
Implicit in discussion of business models in the key articles identified in Table 5 is that business models are something that are first developed by a company and then subsequently delivered to a market; “the focus is on internal processes and design of infrastructure that enables the firm to create value” (Morris et al., 2005: 727). The following passage is also illustrative of such a bias towards an inside-out focus.
“[a business model] begins with articulating a value proposition latent in the new technology. This requires a preliminary definition of what the product offering will be and in what form the customer may use it. The business model must then specify a group of customers or a market segment to whom the proposition will be appealing and from whom resources will be received”.
Chesbrough & Rosenbloom, 2002: 534
A slightly different trajectory has been taken in industrial marketing business model discourse (e.g. Ehret and Wirtz, 2010, Mason and Spring, 2011, Shin and Park, 2009, Storbacka, 2011 and Wirtz and Ehret, 2013). Within this literature, the development of value between partners in a supply chain is emphasised and this appears to mirror concerns in the more recent articles in our sample that fall outside marketing journals (Zott & Amit, 2010). The concept of value co-creation is an emerging theme across the marketing discipline (Fisher and Smith, 2011 and Sheth and Uslay, 2007). Value co-creation was initially conceived as a means through which value is created in conjunction with customers rather than being created entirely inside the boundaries of a single firm and delivered fait accompli (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000, Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a and Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004b). The concept acknowledges the increasing role of consumers as innovators in the development of a value proposition (Von Hippel, Susumu, & De Jong, 2011). The thrust of work examining co-creation within industrial marketing also reflects the acceptance of value being co-created between buyers and suppliers (Vargo & Lusch, 2008) and has more recently been empirically examined in the context of intensive business services (Arikka-Stenroos & Jaakkola, 2012), project networks (Mele, 2011) and complex solution networks (Jaakkola & Hakanen, 2013). Such network based views of value co-creation, in which “multilateral relationships amongst all actors of a network” (Mele, 2011: 1377) are accepted, seem to underpin parallel discussion by industrial marketing scholars examining business models. Mason and Spring (2011: 1033) for instance state that “by divulging different parts of the business model to investors, suppliers and customers, the business model (or fractions of it) becomes sited in the business models of others”. In this sense, other stakeholders outside a single firm become active players in open-business models rather than passive receivers of closed-business models as the above mentioned quotation from Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002), and the thrust of much discussion in the list of influential articles above (Table 5), seems to imply.
The further development of insight into open business models may therefore partially address some of the concerns within the co-creation literature, such those by Andreu, Sanchez, and Mele (2010: 241) that “there is a lack of research focused on providing frameworks that can help organisations to manage the value creation process.” Industrial marketing scholars interested in co-creation have also identified themselves with calls for “an extension of thinking beyond customer supplier relationships, to a network of stakeholder relationships” (Truong, Simmons, & Palmer, 2012: 198) whilst others acknowledge that research examining value co-creation amongst all actors in a network is “still in its infancy” (Mele, 2011: 1377). It is possible therefore to build a credible argument for further development of the business model concept in the industrial marketing literature. It is further possible to present a strong case for the potential of industrial marketing to make distinctive empirical contributions to the broader business model debate. That distinctiveness lies in the development of open business models, co-created with multiple stakeholders in a supply chain, and the end users of a value proposition. The Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group's (IMP) interaction and network perspective for instance contains numerous models and theories that could be deployed to further develop such distinctiveness. The focus within that perspective on the embeddedness of action and relationships across time also offers the potential to develop dynamic open-business models that evolve over time and which are not fixed and static entities (a point recently advanced by Mason and Spring (2011)). Further distinctiveness could be developed in the more quantitative industrial marketing tradition by examining mediated models based on satisfaction, trust, commitment and relationship quality (see for instance Cater and Zabkar, 2009, Keh and Xie, 2009 and Skarmeas et al., 2008), their antecedents and successful business model outcomes.
The value that industrial marketing scholarship offers to the development of business model literature regardless of research tradition would appear to be grounded in the potential to develop the concept of co-creation of value between multiple stakeholders. Here lies the potential value of the business model concept to industrial management practice. Industrial marketing scholars discussing value co-creation point to problems with communicating how value, particularly reciprocal value (Truong et al., 2012) is communicated. This problem only becomes more marked where multiple interactions and value exchanges beyond the buyer–supplier dyad are apparent (Ballantyne et al., 2011). One recognised facet of business models is their ability to communicate a story about value creation (Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart, 2010 and Magretta, 2002). Open business models therefore hold the potential to offer clarity and transparency in reciprocal value exchanges between multiple stakeholders. Whilst this paper does not yet offer direct benefit to practice, it offers a route map for scholarship that may lead to significant benefits to practice being made in the future.
This paper has identified a slightly anomalous situation in which marketing scholars, and in particular industrial marketing scholars, have had little interaction with a developing body of work with which it is possible to demonstrate that much synergy exists. The situation is changing and the nature of this special edition provides evidence of progress. The findings in this paper have contributed to that progress by identifying the key influences in that body of work, and have further advanced a logical argument for further research development within industrial marketing scholarship.
