Real-time big data processing for instantaneous marketing decisions: A problematization approach

The collection of big data from different sources such as the internet of things, social media and search engines has created significant opportunities for business-to-business (B2B) industrial marketing organizations to take an analytical view in developing programmatic marketing approaches for online display advertising. Cleansing, processing and analyzing of such large datasets create challenges for marketing organizations — particularly for real-time decision making and comparative implications. Importantly, there is limited research for such interplays. By utilizing a problematization approach, this paper contributes through the exploration of links between big data, programmatic marketing and real-time processing and relevant decision making for B2B industrial marketing organizations that depend on big data-driven marketing or big data-savvy managers. This exploration subsequently encompasses appropriate big data sources and effective batch and real-time processing linked with structured and unstructured datasets that influence relative processing techniques. Consequently, along with directions for future research, the paper develops interdisciplinary dialogues that overlay computer-engineering frameworks such as Apache Storm and Hadoop within B2B marketing viewpoints and their implications for contemporary marketing practices.     

Social media research in the industrial marketing field: Review of literature and future research directions

Since the emergence of social media, industrial marketing academics and marketers have also been intrigued by the influence of such media on the discipline. As, social media research in the field of industrial marketing has been of increasing interest, this research attempts to review and assess the advances in social media research in the industrial marketing field. From the literature review conducted, it can be identified that some of the research areas have witnessed steady theory development increases, e.g., sales and marketing communications, while others are clearly lagging behind, e.g., pricing and ethics. Also methodological pluralism is called for instead of more traditional methods (conceptual analysis, qualitative and survey) to establish and solve more nuanced research problems. This research provides a review of the current state of research in the field and suggests directions for future development.     

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.     

Digital servitization: Crossing the perspectives of digitization and servitization

For over three decades now, several product companies around the world have been undertaking servitization paths. They have been devoting growing and substantial efforts to expand their service business. Expanding the service business in addition to their traditional core product business secures long-term growth and strengthens competitive advantages in business-to-business marketplaces. Recently, service business expansion has taken up many of the new digital technologies offered through the digital transformation. Thus, the servitization literature has progressed toward a dialogue on digital servitization . Against this background, the present article introduces the reader to this special issue. It first recalls key aspects of the emerging digital servitization discussion, and then depicts, through illustrative case studies, the growth paths utilized by industrial product companies when they take advantage of the digital servitization process. After discussing how the articles included in this special issue advance the literature, the article develops a number of directions for future research on digital servitization.     

Social media-related tensions on business-to-business markets – Evidence from China

Previous research has established the benefits of using social media in support of engagement in business-to-business settings. Yet the study of problems that arise from social media use in business relationships remains limited. Utilizing a dyadic perspective, this study addresses the gap by focusing on tensions in buyer-supplier relationships that arise from social media use. Findings present three dualistic tensions: active engagement anticipated by suppliers versus passive monitoring practices of the buyers; increased transparency through business-to-business social media versus invisibility; as well as tensions between local versus international business-to-business social media engagement practices. The study draws on 52 semi-structured in-depth interviews with senior managers who work in relevant positions at manufacturing firms based in China. By identifying characteristic tensions pertaining to business-to-business social media, this study aims to contribute to research on the ‘dark side’ of business relationships as well as to literature on business-to-business social media engagement.     

Global marketing in business-to-business contexts: Challenges,developments, and opportunities

This article introduces the special issue on global marketing in business-to-business contexts. The aim is to advance knowledge on the subject that can stimulate further research in this important and emerging area of industrial marketing. The twelve contributions selected for this special issue bring together high quality contemporary research that address challenges and recent developments. The articles specifically offer unique insights that progress understanding in the area, provide interesting managerial implications, and present intriguing opportunities for future researchers. These contributions reflect the variety of current work in global marketing in the business-to-business context. While most of the contributions in this special issue focus on the development and deployment of unique resources and capabilities to enhance international competitiveness and performance success, insights are also offered on international relationships and/or relationship marketing within the business-to-business context, country of origin effects, and knowledge transfer between international partners in subsidiaries. The article concludes with a summary of important avenues for further research.     

Sustainability research in business-to-business markets: An agenda for inquiry

Corporate interest in the topic of sustainability has increased in prominence. Most of the research on sustainability has a business-to-consumer focus, with limited research emphasizing sustainability in the context of business-to-business marketing. The paper examines research on sustainability, published in the journal Industrial Marketing Management, where thirty-eight articles have appeared in the past twenty-seven years, the majority on supply-chain research. Research on sustainability in business-to-business markets is sparse, and some of the fundamental research questions in this area have gone unaddressed. This paper addresses three interrelated research issues associated with sustainability in business-to-business markets. First, what research is available to researchers and practitioners? Second, what framework can be used to examine sustainability research in business-to-business markets? Third, what subareas of sustainability research need focus and deeper examination, and what are the associated research questions? Overall, the findings from this paper suggest the need for additional research in the area because of its substantial implications for theory, research, and practice.     

Business-to-business marketing research: Assessing readability and discussing relevance to practitioners

Business practitioners tend to show little interest in academic journals, raising concerns that research-based knowledge potentially relevant to their managerial practice might evade them. The literature suggests academic writing style as one of the major reasons for this lack of interest. Against this background, we quantitatively examine the readability of 150 business-to-business (B2B) marketing research articles published in five leading journals. Our analysis identifies certain variations across journals and categories of papers, implying that it is possible to improve readability. We discuss the possible role of improved readability in encouraging practitioners to read B2B marketing research, while potentially increasing its relevance.     

How employees engage with B2B brands on social media: Word choice and verbal tone

Marketing scholars and practitioners are keenly interested in brand engagement in social media because brand engagement has strong links to brand equity. However, much of the marketing literature focuses on customer brand engagement and often in a consumer market setting. This paper advances this literature in two ways by (1) focusing on employees, not customers, as important stakeholders who frequently engage with brands on social media, and by (2) observing brand engagement in a business-to-business context. We develop a conceptual framework based on a theory of word choice and verbal tone to understand the content of engagement observations (i.e., reviews) that breaks into five content dimensions—activity, optimism, certainty, realism, commonality—and four calculated dimensions—insistence, embellishment, variety, and complexity. Then, we examine over 6300 job reviews authored by employees of B2B firms to explore the differences in the way employees engage with both highly-ranked, and -rated brands versus low-ranked and -rated brands. We find that there are significant differences in nearly all the theoretical dimensions, yet the effect sizes are much larger between high versus low review ratings compared to high versus low B2B brand ranking. We close with some important managerial implications and future research directions.     

trends in Internet-based business-to-business marketing

The Internet is changing the transactional paradigms under which businesses-to-business marketers operate. Business-to-business marketers that take advantage of the operational efficiencies and effectiveness that emerge from utilizing the Internet in transactions are outperforming firms that utilize traditional transactional processes. As an example, Dell computers, by utilizing business-to-business processes that take advantage of the Internet, has gained the largest market share in the PC business when compared to traditional manufacturers such as Compaq. This paper first examines the genesis of the Internet movement in business-to-business markets. The long-term impact of the increase of business-to-business utilization of the Internet on the marketing theory and marketing process is then discussed. Finally, managerial implications and directions for future research are highlighted.     

Developing business customer engagement through social media engagement-platforms: An integrative S-D logic/RBV-informed model

While the service-dominant logic-informed nature of customer engagement in social media has been recognized in business-to-consumer contexts, little is known regarding this theoretical interface in business-to-business (B2B) settings. Insight into business customer engagement (BCE), as expressed through social media and/or other B2B engagement-platforms (e.g. trade shows) and its S-D logic-based antecedents and consequences thus remains limited. Based on the observed gap, this paper integrates the theoretical entities of BCE, B2B social media engagement-platforms, and S-D logic and through its analyses, uncovers the related importance of the resource-based view (RBV) in affecting this association. An integrative S-D logic/RBV-informed model is developed, where BCE denotes an industrial customer's investment of operant/operand resources in supplier interactions via particular B2B engagement-platforms, including social media. The model considers business customer actors and resources in driving business customer resource integration, business customer resource integration effectiveness, and business customer resource integration efficiency, which act as BCE antecedents that extend to coincide with BCE. BCE, in turn, triggers business customer cocreation and relationship productivity, which subsequently, contribute to business customer relationship quality and ultimately, supplier performance. A set of research propositions is derived from the model, which serves as a useful guide for further research. Managerial implications focused on B2B social media marketing are discussed, before we conclude with an overview of research limitations and future research directions.     

Role of big data and social media analytics for business to business sustainability: A participatory web context

The digital transformation is an accumulation of various digital advancements, such as the transformation of the web phenomenon. The participatory web that allows for active user engagement and gather intelligence has been widely recognised as a value add tool by organisations of all shapes and sizes to improve business productivity and efficiency. However, its ability to facilitate sustainable business-to-business (B2B) activities has lacked focus in the business and management literature to date. This qualitative research is exploratory in nature and fills this gap through findings arising from interviews of managers and by developing taxonomies that highlight the capability of participatory web over passive web to enable different firms to engage in business operations. For this purpose, two important interrelated functions of business i.e. operations and marketing have been mapped against three dimensions of sustainability. Consequently, this research demonstrates the ability of big data and social media analytics within a participatory web environment to enable B2B organisations to become profitable and remain sustainable through strategic operations and marketing related business activities. The research findings will be useful for both academics and managers who are interested in understanding and further developing the business use of participatory web tools to achieve business sustainability. Hence, this may be considered as a distinct way of attaining sustainability.     

A comparison of social media marketing between B2B,B2C and mixed business models

This paper explores the implicit assumption in the growing body of literature that social media usage is fundamentally different in business-to-business (B2B) companies than in the extant business-to-consumer (B2C) literature. Sashi's (2012) customer engagement cycle is utilized to compare organizational practices in relation to social media marketing in B2B, B2C, Mixed B2B/B2C and B2B2C business models. Utilizing 449 responses to an exploratory panel based survey instrument, we clearly identify differences in social media usage and its perceived importance as a communications channel. In particular we identify distinct differences in the relationship between social media importance and the perceived effectiveness of social media marketing across business models. Our results indicate that B2B social media usage is distinct from B2C, Mixed and B2B2C business model approaches. Specifically B2B organizational members perceive social media to have a lower overall effectiveness as a channel and identify it as less important for relationship oriented usage than other business models.     

From transactions to journeys and beyond: The evolution of B2B buying process modeling

Consultants and pundits assert that the business-to-business (B2B) buying process has changed markedly in recent years due to the emergence of online, digital applications and software. Recognizing that impactful, and truly innovative future research is perhaps best created when built on the foundation of past science, we review the arc of B2B buying process modeling from 1956 to the present. Our goals with this research are to: 1. capture the genealogy and evolution of thinking across the years in terms of foundation theories, reasoning approach, types of models, factors researched, and journals in which articles were published, 2. identify the thematic inflection points in the research stream that have led to the current conceptualizations, and 3. suggest a research agenda for the future. We discovered that academic understanding of the B2B buying process has progressed in waves featuring seven themes – transactions, situations, influences, responses, relationships, networks and journeys. Looking to the future, we recommend that scholars examine five areas of research: the impact of technology, modes of customer and supplier interaction, decision-making approaches, tensions between internal and external communities, and B2B marketing analytics.     

Recent advances in identifying and theorizing the role of immigrant entrepreneurs,ethnicity, and culture in industrial marketing

This special issue of Industrial Marketing Management (IMM) features four articles that cover topics related to immigrant entrepreneurs, ethnicity, and culture in industrial marketing. This introductory paper summarizes the contributions of these articles and points out future research directions.     

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.     

Relationships and networks as examined in Industrial Marketing Management

The importance of the study of relationships and networks within business-to-business marketing is clear from the numerous articles written over the years that aim to give us greater insight into these two concepts. This paper reviews six of these articles. What sets these six apart from others is that they are the most highly cited articles on relationships and networks published in Industrial Marketing Management between 1995 and 2004. We examine each of these articles in terms of their scholarly impact and identify what researchers have learnt from these highly cited papers. Our conclusions show some interesting similarities that we feel has led to these articles being so highly cited. We conclude that the key to citation success is the identification of new research avenues. In addition, the chances of writing excellent papers seems to be improved when collaborating with others, rather than writing alone. By introducing new ideas these authors have not only been successful in their own work, but have given others the platforms to build on, thereby generating much more research in this area.     

Global marketing of industrial products: Are interpersonal relationships always critical?

The present paper examines the issue of whether interpersonal relationships are critical for global marketing of industrial products. The fields of relationship marketing, IMP group research, sales research, and network theory have stressed the importance of interpersonal relationships in the business-to-business or industrial marketing context. In contrast to this emphasis on interpersonal relationships, we argue that industrial firms can both conceive and enhance marketing strategies based on developing high quality and consistent processes, products, services or outcomes (consistent processes and outcomes). Such strategies are especially important given the fact that developing interpersonal relationships is expensive due to their reliance on frequent and/or face-to-face communications. In this paper, we examine industry and country contexts that lead to the choice of alternative industrial product marketing strategies and highlight some future research directions and managerial implications.     

Coopetition and COVID-19: Collaborative business-to-business marketing strategies in a pandemic crisis

Although coopetition (simultaneous cooperation and competition) should positively affect company performance, it is unclear how implementation of these business-to-business marketing strategies can take place during large-scale emergencies. Therefore, guided by resource-based theory and the relational view, this investigation examines how organisations have used coopetition to cope with the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Key examples include retailers sharing information about stock levels, pharmaceutical organisations working together to develop a vaccine, technological giants collaborating for the greater good, and charities forming alliances for a joint cause. This paper strengthens the extant literature by highlighting the heterogeneity of coopetition strategies that firms can use within a global crisis. Practitioners must balance the risks and rewards of coopetition activities. In turn, they should decide whether to continue to cooperate with their competitors once the pandemic has ended, or resume operating under individualistic business models. This article ends with some future research directions.