R&D,networking expenses,and firm performance: An integration of the inside-out and outside-in perspectives

Is outside-in networking less influential than inside-out R&D on firm performance? Over the past three decades, the inside-out perspective stands at the core of the marketing literature, whereas there is a subconscious bias toward the outside-in perspective. Building on the outside-in and inside-out perspectives of the firm, this study answers the question of whether outside-in networking is indeed less effective than inside-out R&D for enhancing firm performance. The empirical findings based on multiple archival data sources collected on firms operating in China indicate that the effects of networking expenses on firm performance are not weaker than those of R&D expenses. The findings also indicate that the effects of inside-out R&D and outside-in networking expenses are enhanced when firms operate in regions with stronger consumer protection whereas inside-out R&D expenses become less effective in a corrupt environment.     

Strategic marketing and business performance: A study in three European ‘engineering countries’

In spite of its relevance, the effects of strategic marketing on business performance are sparingly studied, especially in particular business contexts. We address this gap in two ways. First, we examine the influence of four key strategic marketing concepts—market orientation, innovation orientation, and two marketing capability categories (outside-in and inside-out capabilities)—on company performance. Second, these relationships are studied in three European “engineering countries:” Austria, Finland and Germany. Their relative homogeneity enables testing the generality versus context-specificity of strategic marketing's performance impact. Using SEM analysis, surprisingly weak relationships between market orientation and outside-in capabilities, and business performance are identified, as opposed to the strong role of inside-out capabilities and innovation orientation. These results can be understood through the “engineering country” characteristics. Moreover, clear differences in results are identified among these relatively homogenous countries. This is a major finding as it challenges the widely assumed generality of the strategic marketing–performance relationship. Country-specific results have also considerable managerial relevance.     

Artificial intelligence as an enabler of B2B marketing: A dynamic capabilities micro-foundations approach

Over the past few decades research has predominantly focused on the technical aspects and theoretical challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the deluge of data and the increase in processing power, businesses are now facing the challenge of how to deploy AI that generates business value. In this direction, there is still nascent research on how AI can be leveraged in for B2B operations, and particularly marketing. To address this gap, this study draws on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm and specifically on the micro-foundations approach and builds on three selected case studies of large organizations in Norway that use AI for B2B marketing purposes. The study identifies a number of AI-specific micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities, essentially highlighting how organizations can use AI to manage B2B marketing operations in dynamic and uncertain environments. This study also identified several key cross-cutting elements emerging from the data, demonstrating how some key concepts are inter-related and how they affect overall business value.     

The digital marketing capabilities gap

Over the past two decades, digitalization has revolutionized not only consumer marketing but also industrial marketing. Both industrial marketing scholars and industrial marketers seek insights to understand how our knowledge and practice of digital marketing has been structured and configured. To address this gap, we adopt the resource-based perspective as an organizing framework and systematically review 129 articles spanning two decades of research to identify different digital marketing capabilities in industrial firms. From this analysis, we identify four themes: channels, social media, digital relationships, and digital technologies. We then stress-test this knowledge with managerial practices by conducting an online survey of 169 managers, designed to establish the repertoire of current and future marketing capability needs of industrial firms. Herein, we identify two marketing capabilities gaps: the practice gap—which identifies the deficit between managers' ‘current’ practices and their ‘ideal’ digital marketing capabilities; and, the knowledge gap—which demonstrates a significant divide between the digital marketing transformations in industrial firms and the extant scholarly knowledge that underpins this. Based on these results, we build an agenda for future research on digital marketing capabilities.     

Differential effects of firm generated content on consumer digital engagement and firm performance: An outside-in perspective

Social media contains a massive amount of information, which provides researchers and practitioners with an invaluable source of data to conduct research from end-users' perspectives, in order to influence firm strategic choices. Although an extensive amount of research has been developed in B2C and B2B marketing context, few social media studies take a dive into potential linkages between external and internal marketing contexts in an industry specific paradigm. This study aims to bridge B2C and B2B social media marketing, by adopting the outside-in perspective as theoretical lens. Using a large-scale dataset, collected from a micro-blogging site, and consumer-oriented information assembled from multiple sources, we empirically examine the inter-relationship between firm-generated messages, consumer digital engagement, and firm sales performance in the movie industry. Theoretically, this study builds upon the outside-in perspective and extends the current knowledge of the outside-in perspective to the social media context. It also bridges the B2C and B2B marketing literature by demonstrating that the insight garnered from B2C social media interactions should be integrated into the B2B firm interactions, communications, and decision makings. Managerially, this study provides movie practitioners with important implications.     

Marketing ecosystem: An outside-in view for sustainable advantage

In the modern business environment, consumers are increasingly influenced by megatrends involving marketplace, technology, socioeconomics, geopolitics, and natural environment. Simultaneously, the data and insights that can inform consumer attitudes and behaviors often reside outside of firms' direct control. Consciously incorporating these interdependent factors into firms' decision-making is essential for adaptability and sustainable profitability.Building on the “outside-in” perspective, we propose that firm strategies should be informed through the lens of the marketing ecosystem that considers the interrelated and dynamic megatrends. By leveraging advances in data and technology, firms can sense-make the marketplace by extracting insights from massive amounts of diverse consumer data with modern-day analytics. By mapping out the megatrends with marketing analytics, firms can 1) more accurately predict consumers' changing preferences and formulate appropriate strategies to engage with them; and 2) become more market-adaptable and competitive in the present and the future.To deliver sustainably compelling value to customers, firms should adopt an ecosystem mindset and cooperate with various stakeholders. A broad-thinking, agile, and humble firm culture can enable the development of more robust outside-in capabilities. We elaborate on the megatrends in the interconnected world of the marketing ecosystem, and propose emerging research directions in each area.     

Networks,ecosystems, fields,market systems? Making sense of the business environment

This positioning paper is informed by our judgment that the mainstream research on business marketing and marketing in general is losing its relevance and vigor because it views business environments as narrow “markets” and focuses primarily on dyadic business relationships and their management. Sticking to this limited, economics-driven market view has detached the discipline from major real-world phenomena, leaving it with scant understanding of the contemporary environmental context of marketing and business strategy. Based on a focused reading of literature on business fields, business networks, business ecosystems, and market systems, we venture our own comprehensive theoretical framing of complex business environments summarized in two frameworks. In the pursuit of relevance our integration is avowedly simplifying as we strive for parsimony. Key points explicate the nested, multi-layered, multimodal, transitional and conditioned character of the business environment, and the dynamics, phases and processes of the evolution of that nested environment. We use the frameworks constructed, which form an initial theory of complex business environments, to supply a research agenda for business marketing and offer brief managerial conclusions.     

Network ties in the outside-in strategy: Contingencies of resource endowments and absorptive capacity

Network ties play an important role in the outside-in strategy for marketing and competitive advantages. However, prior research adopting the outside-in view has not always been clear on the impact of network ties. We propose a contingency view that the mere presence of network ties is not sufficient for performance improvement; rather, network ties need to be combined with resource endowments of the alters and absorptive capacity of the ego. These three components work together and reinforce each other in inducing desirable outcomes. We further apply this contingency view to the adoption of health information technology (HIT) by US hospitals. The results strongly support the contingency view. Our study helps reconcile the conflicting findings on the impact of network ties and contributes to the literature of outside-in strategy and social network.     

Outside-in marketing: Why,when and how?

We explore the nature and evolution of outside-in marketing. Outside-in is the marketing view of strategy, with inside-out being the traditional view. We show how outside-in and inside-out clash culturally, and trade off strategically, especially in service. Technological advances in communications and information technology have enabled closer relationships with customers, and “big data” for managing those relationships. The marketing function is important for managing outside-in, because market orientation alone is insufficient. Outside-in management is most effective for focusing on customer satisfaction and revenue, since insights about customer needs and wants tend to move bottom-up through the organization. Taken to its logical conclusion, outside-in implies replacing inside-out, product-focused management (e.g., brand managers) with outside-in, customer-focused management (e.g., customer managers). Customer-focused, future-oriented metrics (e.g., customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value, customer equity) increasingly grab attention away from aggregate, short-term metrics (e.g., product sales). Long-term impact from customer-relevant issues such as discrimination plays out over time, and must be researched using longitudinal methods. Eventually, even the meaning of “outside” will change, as computers increasingly become the customer.     

Sense-making in business markets – the interplay between cognition,action and outcomes

Business markets are characterized by interdependences between business actors. How these actors make sense of such interdependencies is a matter of both theoretical and practical importance. Research on cognitive foundations for competition in business markets, based on organization and strategic management, has evolved considerably since the 1980s. Also, researchers on business markets that are based on marketing and adopt a network perspective, have become increasingly interested in cognition and sense-making over the last two decades. The concepts network pictures and network understanding have been in focus for this research, which has resulted in a demand for improved clarity of the interplay between cognition, action and outcome, as well as for a stronger integration between parallel research developments from related disciplines and research approaches. A better understanding of how individual and collective views are developed is also required. This Special Issue, originated in the network perspective of business markets, is aimed to address these issues.     

Customer information resources advantage,marketing strategy and business performance: A market resources based view

Chief among a firm's market-based resources are its relational resources such as brand equity, customer equity and channel equity that result from its interactions with customers and marketing intermediaries, and intellectual resources – accumulated knowledge about entities in the market environment such as consumers, end use and intermediate customers and competitors. In the evolving digital data rich market environment, customer-based resources, a subset of a firm's market-based resources, are becoming increasingly important as potential sources of competitive advantage. Customer information assets refer to information of economic value about customers owned by a firm. Information analysis capabilities are complex bundles of skills and knowledge embedded in a firm's organizational processes employed to generate customer knowledge from customer information assets. Customer insights or knowledge is a firm's extent of understanding of customers that informs its business decisions. Building on the resource-based, capabilities-based and knowledge-based views of the firm, resource advantage theory of competition, and the outside-in and inside-out approaches to strategy, this article presents a market resources-based view of strategy, competitive advantage and performance. The article presents a framework delineating the relationship between a firm's customer information based resources, marketing strategy and performance, and discusses implications for theory, research and practice.     

Open R&D and open innovation: exploring the phenomenon

There is currently a broad awareness of open innovation and its relevance to corporate R&D. The implications and trends that underpin open innovation are actively discussed in terms of strategic, organizational, behavioral, knowledge, legal and business perspectives, and its economic implications. This special issue aims to advance the R&D, innovation, and technology management perspective by building on past and present studies in the field and providing future directions. Recent research, including the papers in this special issue, demonstrates an increasing range of situations where the concept is regarded as applicable. Most research to date has followed the outside-in process of open innovation, while the inside-out process remains less explored. A third coupled process of open innovation is also attracting significant research attention. These different processes show why it is necessary to have a full understanding of how and where open innovation can add value in knowledge-intensive processes. There may be a need for a creative interpretation and adaptation of the value propositions, or business models, in each situation. In other words, there are important implications for new and emerging methods of R&D management.     

The structure and evolution of business-to-business marketing: A citation and co-citation analysis

The field of business-to-business (B2B) marketing has grown considerably in the past four decades. However the state of knowledge about its structure and evolution remains limited. Who are the key players and what are the key papers in B2B marketing? What main research topics have been investigated over time? This article answers these questions by applying bibliometric methods for the first time to the existing body of scholarly B2B research. The key findings reveal a highly dynamic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, when new knowledge was being intensively exchanged among an increasing number of B2B researchers. Since that time, the pace of development has slowed, and diversification in the discipline manifested itself in a distinctive number of core research subfields. Yet initial research topics such as organizational buying behavior, where much research is still undone, are to a large extent not addressed by modern B2B scholars.     

How to develop original,courageous ideas in business marketing research

Despite evidence of meticulous business-to business marketing research efforts, and the pleas of editors for truly original, ground-breaking research, there is still a shortage of original, courageous research ideas. To provide guidance to researchers and address this problem, we apply the OBC model (observe the world, bridge disciplines, and challenge assumptions and theories), proposed by Kock, Assaf, and Tsionas (2020). We discuss the three main and four blended strategies recommended by this model, and illustrate each of these strategies with examples drawn from the marketing literature. Our application of the OBC model offers actionable guidelines for generating original research ideas, as well as theoretical grounding for each element of the model. Given the publication pressure felt by young academic researchers, we hope that our discussion provides encouragement and guidance, which will result in original, courageous business-to-business marketing research.     

Buyer-supplier relational strength and buying firm's marketing capability: An outside-in perspective

Extant literature in marketing capability with an inside-out perspective stresses existing internal resources as the basis for developing marketing capability. This study, taking an outside-in perspective, argues that starting from external environment and developing strong buyer-supplier relationship can help formulate strong marketing capability of the buying firm. Using survey data from 199 Chinese manufacturing buyers who identified 937 suppliers, we found that strong buyer-supplier relationship can breed strong supplier information sharing and supplier flexibility, which fully mediate the effect of buyer-supplier relationship on buying firms' marketing capability. The findings provide support to the outside-in approach and reveal how external inter-firm relationship can be turned into intra-firm capability, and suggest that strong upstream buyer-supplier relationship can be a necessity for building downstream buyers' marketing capabilities. The findings also suggest an alternative strategy for developing marketing capabilities starting from external suppliers, and may help close the gap between marketing capability and dynamic external environment.     

Customer reference marketing: Conceptualization,measurement and link to selling performance

The use of customer references to facilitate marketing and sales in business markets has received growing interest among practitioners and academics. The importance of references has been highlighted in a wide range of contexts, such as customer relationship management, customer value management, sales, and marketing communications. Yet knowledge about the effective application of references in business remains scant, and studies have not addressed in-depth what constitutes customer reference marketing or studied its relation to firm performance. This study contributes to this important but underdeveloped business marketing topic by 1) conceptualizing customer reference marketing based on theory and an extensive qualitative field study, 2) building a measure for the construct using survey data, and 3) demonstrating its relevance by linking the construct to firms' selling performance with additional collected data. The results broaden and specify the current understanding of how to effectively deploy references in business markets and provide evidence of the hypothesized performance, as well as contingency effects. The established conceptual foundations for the phenomenon provide substantial opportunities for practitioners and theory-testing oriented business marketing research.     

The impact of aligning business,IT, and marketing strategies on firm performance

In order to succeed in today's competitive business environment, a firm should have a clear business strategy that is supported by other organizational strategies. While prior studies argue that strategic alignment enhances firm performance, either strategic alignment including multiple factors or strategic orientation of firms has received little attention. This study, drawing on contingency theory and configuration theory, investigates the performance impact of triadic strategic alignment among business, IT, and marketing strategies while simultaneously considers strategic orientation of firms. A research model is tested through SEM and MANOVA using data collected in a questionnaire survey of 242 Yemen managers. The findings indicate that (1) triadic strategic alignment has a positive impact on firm performance and (2) there is an ideal triadic strategic alignment for prospectors and defenders. This research contributes to strategic alignment literature and managers' understanding of how to align business, IT and marketing strategies to improve firm performance.     

A systematic review of the trade show marketing literature: 1980–2014

The trade show marketing literature has been growing over the past decades, attracting a steady stream of research and journal publications. However, this body of research has not been subject to a systematic literature review. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to provide a systematic review of the trade show marketing literature with the aim of delineating its current state, trends, gaps and inconsistencies. To this end, multiple electronic databases were searched and 91 trade show articles published in 24 marketing journals were extracted. The extracted articles were carefully analyzed with the help of a comprehensive classification framework focusing on broad thematic, theoretical and methodological dimensions. The findings revealed that: (a) trade show research is marked by inconsistencies that concern core thematic issues, such as trade show participation modes, trade show activity stages and trade show performance; (b) trade show research is atheoretical for the most part, but has become increasingly theory oriented in recent years; and (c) trade show research is heavily dependent on a combination of cross-sectional designs and surveys, with limited application of other designs and data collection approaches. Building on these findings, the review proposes an extensive research agenda to help move the trade show marketing literature forward.     

A framework for offshoring marketing processes in business-to-business marketing relationships

Outsourcing has been a prominent aspect of business strategies in the last three decades. Outsourcing of manufacturing processes is now complemented with outsourcing of various marketing process as well. More importantly, outsourcing to foreign locations — offshoring — has increased for marketing processes in recent years. In this context, the present paper develops a model that identifies the types of marketing interactions and processes that can be offshored in business-to-business markets. We suggest that the decision to offshore marketing processes and interactions depend upon the interaction process that is preferred and the importance of interaction process itself. Marketing interactions that are not critically important and/or those that can be performed through technology can be easily offshored. However, other marketing processes need to be examined in depth before being offshored. Implications for research and practice in the area of offshoring, as well as in the broader area of outsourcing, are also highlighted.