Future research suggestions
| Authors | Future research |
|---|---|
| Heide and Miner (1992) | 1. Use multiple theories to analyze relationships |
| Kim and Frazier (1997) | 1. What are consequences of different types of commitment? 2. Dyadic difference in commitment through dyadic studies of channel relationships |
| Leuthesser (1997) | 1. Measure performance from a supplier's and buyer’s perspective |
| Selnes and Gønhaug (2000) | 1. Examine how customers’ perceptions of salesperson’s empathy (cognitive and affective) influence sales outcomes such as sales volumes and salesperson performance indicators |
| Jap (2001) | 1. Consider other drivers of competitive advantage, such as environmental conditions and competitive actions. 2. How buyer–supplier dyads respond to the competitive signals and actions of competing dyads. 3. How does technology provide opportunities for bolstering or impeding competitive advantages? 4. What can buyers and suppliers do together to leverage emerging technologies at the boundaries of the firm? |
| Bonner and Calantone (2005) | 1. Future research using longitudinal analysis is called for to fully examine the dynamics with different partners. 2. Outcomes should include (1) expected future revenues and costs; (2) attitudinal dimensions, such as the buyer’s propensity to defect or commitment to the relationship; and (3) purchase process characteristics, such as consideration set size and buying process openness. 2. How product innovativeness strengthens or weakens the relationship between attentiveness and favorable buyer purchase behaviour |
| van der Valk (2008) | 1. Replicating the findings. 2. Determine more precisely the extent to which the observed patterns fit the ideal pattern |
| Voss et al. (2009) | 1.Future research should examine patterns of security adoption of suppliers |
| Steward et al. (2010) | 1.Explore antecedents of country's institutional environment. 2. Include nation-based normative expectations and compare firms in different countries |
| Mai and Hoffmann (2011) | 1.Consider other industrial sectors, other contexts (e.g. personal selling of products, government-to-business/citizen communication) or various categories of services and different cultures |
| Kim et al. (2011) | 1. Whether it is more important in close relationships to engage in constructive acts or to not commit destructive acts? 2. Intentional destructive acts versus unintentional destructive acts and, thus, contrast the potential role of dealer commitment under intentional or unintentional destructive acts by a supplier. 3. Interaction between different types of commitment |
| Wiatr Borg and Vagn Freytag (2012) | 1. On what level is the attention, management or governance of the interpersonal relationship attempted? What effect does this attempt have on the other correlating levels? 2. Is there a connecting or “red thread” in the company’s relationship strategy woven through the operative activities on the inner sales characteristics level to the outer environment level? Or are there merely sporadic managerial attempts on random levels? |
| Brown et al. (2012) | 1. Drivers of brand sensitivity (e.g. end-customer demand and contractual ties) 2. Use of multi-item measures. 3. Consider novel purchase situations to analyze brand sensitivity. 4. Evaluate the effects of informational conditions (e.g. availability or quality of information) on brand sensitivity |
| Strandvik et al. (2012) | 1. Uncover differences/similarities in seller views and conduct more research on dynamic factors that can be key in decision-making |
| Hadjikhani and LaPlaca (2013) | 1. 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? 2. A further discussion about “What is a relationship?” is needed |
| El-Manstrly (2014) | 1. Consider other switching costs (e.g. learning costs, set up costs) |
| Gould, Liu and Yu (2016) | 1. Study on local partner firms in emerging markets to analyze the liability of foreignness, high status and opportunism and related B2B governance choices |
| Li et al. (2017) | 1. Analyze outcomes, such as cost, quality and flexibility of production of the manufacturers and sales performance of the distributors. 2. Replicate to generalize to other industrial or national context. 3. Conduct a longitudinal survey, with interviews and objective data, which would enhance researchers' ability to identify the dynamics between partners over time and to disclose the underlying causal mechanisms |
| Kaski et al. (2017) | 1. Use authentic data from the sales interaction situations (and not collected through interviews) |
| Aarikka-Stenroos et al. (2018) | 1. Examine how the features of industry, geographical or cultural context. 2. Whether the long-term relationship strategy of service companies is changing the importance of initiation processes. Some initiation contributors or process elements seem to be more important than others and, therefore, deserve to become the focus of future studies. For example, standards as artefactual initiation contributors and early access as a key element seemed to be crucial |
| Delpechitre et al. (2019) | 1. Assessing customer’s perception of salesperson’s empathy and salesperson’s empathy simultaneously through role-playing scenarios |
| Zhang et al. (2019) | 1. There may be differences in buyer’s and supplier's perspectives on how to respond to opportunism and restore trust. 2. Analyze how miscommunication and misunderstanding can affect trust development. 3. Explore the unintentional offenses of B2B relationships and their influence on B2B relationship maintenance. 3.Future research can replicate our findings in other industries and institutional contexts to examine whether the industry or institutional environment play a role in determining firms' selection of response strategies to different types of opportunism and the efficacy of each strategy at trust restoration after opportunism |
| Gelderman et al. (2019) | 1. Investigate how cognitive dissonance is managed by people with a strong internal locus of control |
| Zhang et al. (2019) | 1. Regarding online reverse auction (ORA): How can an ORA be technically improved to work as a value tool not only a price decreasing pressure tool? What emotions are developed in the before, during and after ORA process? How do such emotions interplay during the whole auction process? What topics have concentrated the attention of B2B marketing researchers? Why do managers continue implementing ORAs? How can other fields’ ORA understanding be integrated with what we know in B2B marketing? |
| Steward et al. (2019) | 1. 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 |
| Caruana et al. (2020) | 1. Replicate findings on perspective-taking to cooperation with larger samples in different contexts. 2. Examine interlocking behaviors in solution and not only on perspective-taking and cooperation. 2. What training, sensitization, reward and other activities are likely to work best in fostering perspective-taking among managers in business relationships. 3. The adoption of an aptitude conceptualization of perspective-taking may potentially have broader application to other areas of marketing where interaction takes place |
| Sharma and Sengupta (2020) | 1.Individual factors (e.g. stakeholders and personal preferences) or information quality on brand sensitivity. It would be useful to understand when brand information enters the evaluation scheme and its relative importance compared with other criteria for various decision tactics (e.g. rule-based and personal/professional). 2. A longitudinal study or ethnographic study in which the researcher can actively participate and observe the intricacies of purchase decisions would provide deeper insights to develop further branding theories (B2B context). 3. The three-dimensional representation of brand sensitivity should be examined in new tasks and straight rebuy situations to understand whether brands play any role in decision processes |
| Bharadwaj and Shipley (2020) | Authors offer several future researches organized by sender's cues, training and recruiting, organizational strategy and structure, suitability of digital interaction and dark side of digital sales interactions |
| Kemp et al. (2020) | 1. Actual buyers regarding the considerations, feelings and values they possess in the decision-making process. 2. The use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. 3. Actual advertising designed to appeal to specific emotions of buyers might be used to assess buyers’ attitudes and possible engagement tendencies. 4. Central versus peripheral processing of these stimuli might also be assessed in different media (i.e. social media, print and television). 5. Research opportunities abound for exploring the role of emotions and the centrality of advertising in communicating information and fostering personal and emotional connections with buyers |
| Itani et al. (2020) | 1. Claim for a longitudinal study and conduct cross-industry comparisons. 2. Analyze frequency of use and the type of technology usage as moderators. Researchers are encouraged to examine other organizational and individual factors that could enhance or diminish the effects of sales technology on salesperson information exchange behaviors and the resulting buyer responses |
| Kingshott et al. (2020) | 1. Value chains are likely to involve more than two organizations that span both national and/or cultural boundaries. Thus, exploring the relationship marketing dynamics (as reflected in the conceptual model) within the context of a broader network of value chain participants to provide an even more comprehensive picture. 2. Explore drivers of Psychological Contract Breaches (one party’s perception of relational obligations that need to be undertaken by the other party). 3. Explore how cultural context influences Psychological Contract Breaches |
| Anwer et al. (2020) | 1. Collect more data, consider longitudinal designs for studies and replicate in other countries. 2. Consider other values both positive and negative in business purchasing. 3. Explore value congruency in the two partners organizations. 4. Incorporate the concept of organizational culture and norms for a more holistic understanding of business purchase decisions. 5. What are the values portrayed by goods and services and their influence on business purchase decisions? 6. Incorporate quality or satisfaction aspects of business purchase decisions. 7. Compare the results across personal and organizational demographic items and between private vs public organizations. 8. Conduct case studies across several organizations and sample employees at different hierarchical levels in organization |
| Khan and Eilert (2020) | 1. Test the motivations of buyers to establish long-term relationships or safeguard their investments. 2. How suppliers react to the proposed governance mechanism by the buyer, especially when they are planning on making substantial investments in the relationship? 3.Use field or laboratory experiments and case studies can provide more in-depth insights into the intricacies of the different types of buyer and supplier investments and short- and long-term relationship governance considerations |
| Zhang et al. (2021) | 1. Future studies can use longitudinal data, explore the interactive effects of contractual and relative governance differentiation strategies on firms' value appropriation (VA). 2. Investigation of possible moderating effects on the relative governance–VA link. 3. Future studies should differentiate between two types of trust (i.e. goodwill- and capability-based), two types of justice (i.e. procedural and distributive) and two types of opportunism (i.e. strong form and weak form) |
| Crosno et al. (2020) | 1. Explore how opportunism develops in contractual negotiation. 2. The willingness to invest in a relationship could be replaced by charting actual investments in a trading partner, and expectations of continuity could be replaced with a longitudinal measure of relationship longevity |
| Graça and Khare (2020) | 1. Are informal social capital networks in emerging countries similar in structure? 2. What facets of informal networks mostly influence commitment between members under distinct institutional and cultural contexts? 3. Are there universal strategies to improve social and business relationships across distinct emerging markets? |
| Prior and Keränen (2020) | 1. How can supplier firms engage productively with buyer firms to develop a clear vision for customer solutions development and delivery? How can supplier firms develop the necessary capabilities to lead customer solutions development and delivery? How can supplier firms integrate diverse offerings from multiple suppliers for innovative, future-oriented customer solutions? How can supplier firms determine when to engage in customer solutions development? 2. What contractual forms are most likely to create cross-functional integration to affect a seamless customer experience? How can supplier firms address the need for customer alignment as both a strategic and interpersonal phenomenon? How can suppliers use processes, procedures and other infrastructure to support cross-functional alignment, noting the fluidity of functional definitions? 3. How can B2B relationships serve as a platform for addressing societal problems? How can agency problems be overcome to encourage a societal-level awareness of B2B relationships? What are the appropriate societal mechanisms (e.g. regulation) that could encourage more responsible B2B relationships? How can we conceptualize sustainability performance at the service ecosystem/ network level? How can zero waste production, transport and exchange processes integrate into B2B relationships? 4. How can B2B firms develop customer solutions for customers that operate in different market contexts, noting the challenges above? How can B2B relationships promote strong linkages with customers in emerging markets? How can B2B collate, analyze and understand diverse information and distribute it to appropriate stakeholders seamlessly? |
| Future research | |
|---|---|
| 1. Use multiple theories to analyze relationships | |
| 1. What are consequences of different types of commitment? 2. Dyadic difference in commitment through dyadic studies of channel relationships | |
| 1. Measure performance from a supplier's and buyer’s perspective | |
| 1. Examine how customers’ perceptions of salesperson’s empathy (cognitive and affective) influence sales outcomes such as sales volumes and salesperson performance indicators | |
| 1. Consider other drivers of competitive advantage, such as environmental conditions and competitive actions. 2. How buyer–supplier dyads respond to the competitive signals and actions of competing dyads. 3. How does technology provide opportunities for bolstering or impeding competitive advantages? 4. What can buyers and suppliers do together to leverage emerging technologies at the boundaries of the firm? | |
| 1. Future research using longitudinal analysis is called for to fully examine the dynamics with different partners. 2. Outcomes should include (1) expected future revenues and costs; (2) attitudinal dimensions, such as the buyer’s propensity to defect or commitment to the relationship; and (3) purchase process characteristics, such as consideration set size and buying process openness. 2. How product innovativeness strengthens or weakens the relationship between attentiveness and favorable buyer purchase behaviour | |
| 1. Replicating the findings. 2. Determine more precisely the extent to which the observed patterns fit the ideal pattern | |
| 1.Future research should examine patterns of security adoption of suppliers | |
| 1.Explore antecedents of country's institutional environment. 2. Include nation-based normative expectations and compare firms in different countries | |
| 1.Consider other industrial sectors, other contexts (e.g. personal selling of products, government-to-business/citizen communication) or various categories of services and different cultures | |
| 1. Whether it is more important in close relationships to engage in constructive acts or to not commit destructive acts? 2. Intentional destructive acts versus unintentional destructive acts and, thus, contrast the potential role of dealer commitment under intentional or unintentional destructive acts by a supplier. 3. Interaction between different types of commitment | |
| 1. On what level is the attention, management or governance of the interpersonal relationship attempted? What effect does this attempt have on the other correlating levels? 2. Is there a connecting or “red thread” in the company’s relationship strategy woven through the operative activities on the inner sales characteristics level to the outer environment level? Or are there merely sporadic managerial attempts on random levels? | |
| 1. Drivers of brand sensitivity (e.g. end-customer demand and contractual ties) 2. Use of multi-item measures. 3. Consider novel purchase situations to analyze brand sensitivity. 4. Evaluate the effects of informational conditions (e.g. availability or quality of information) on brand sensitivity | |
| 1. Uncover differences/similarities in seller views and conduct more research on dynamic factors that can be key in decision-making | |
| 1. 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? 2. A further discussion about “What is a relationship?” is needed | |
| 1. Consider other switching costs (e.g. learning costs, set up costs) | |
| 1. Study on local partner firms in emerging markets to analyze the liability of foreignness, high status and opportunism and related B2B governance choices | |
| 1. Analyze outcomes, such as cost, quality and flexibility of production of the manufacturers and sales performance of the distributors. 2. Replicate to generalize to other industrial or national context. 3. Conduct a longitudinal survey, with interviews and objective data, which would enhance researchers' ability to identify the dynamics between partners over time and to disclose the underlying causal mechanisms | |
| 1. Use authentic data from the sales interaction situations (and not collected through interviews) | |
| 1. Examine how the features of industry, geographical or cultural context. 2. Whether the long-term relationship strategy of service companies is changing the importance of initiation processes. Some initiation contributors or process elements seem to be more important than others and, therefore, deserve to become the focus of future studies. For example, standards as artefactual initiation contributors and early access as a key element seemed to be crucial | |
| 1. Assessing customer’s perception of salesperson’s empathy and salesperson’s empathy simultaneously through role-playing scenarios | |
| 1. There may be differences in buyer’s and supplier's perspectives on how to respond to opportunism and restore trust. 2. Analyze how miscommunication and misunderstanding can affect trust development. 3. Explore the unintentional offenses of B2B relationships and their influence on B2B relationship maintenance. 3.Future research can replicate our findings in other industries and institutional contexts to examine whether the industry or institutional environment play a role in determining firms' selection of response strategies to different types of opportunism and the efficacy of each strategy at trust restoration after opportunism | |
| 1. Investigate how cognitive dissonance is managed by people with a strong internal locus of control | |
| 1. Regarding online reverse auction (ORA): How can an ORA be technically improved to work as a value tool not only a price decreasing pressure tool? What emotions are developed in the before, during and after ORA process? How do such emotions interplay during the whole auction process? What topics have concentrated the attention of B2B marketing researchers? Why do managers continue implementing ORAs? How can other fields’ ORA understanding be integrated with what we know in B2B marketing? | |
| 1. 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 | |
| 1. Replicate findings on perspective-taking to cooperation with larger samples in different contexts. 2. Examine interlocking behaviors in solution and not only on perspective-taking and cooperation. 2. What training, sensitization, reward and other activities are likely to work best in fostering perspective-taking among managers in business relationships. 3. The adoption of an aptitude conceptualization of perspective-taking may potentially have broader application to other areas of marketing where interaction takes place | |
| 1.Individual factors (e.g. stakeholders and personal preferences) or information quality on brand sensitivity. It would be useful to understand when brand information enters the evaluation scheme and its relative importance compared with other criteria for various decision tactics (e.g. rule-based and personal/professional). 2. A longitudinal study or ethnographic study in which the researcher can actively participate and observe the intricacies of purchase decisions would provide deeper insights to develop further branding theories (B2B context). 3. The three-dimensional representation of brand sensitivity should be examined in new tasks and straight rebuy situations to understand whether brands play any role in decision processes | |
| Authors offer several future researches organized by sender's cues, training and recruiting, organizational strategy and structure, suitability of digital interaction and dark side of digital sales interactions | |
| 1. Actual buyers regarding the considerations, feelings and values they possess in the decision-making process. 2. The use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. 3. Actual advertising designed to appeal to specific emotions of buyers might be used to assess buyers’ attitudes and possible engagement tendencies. 4. Central versus peripheral processing of these stimuli might also be assessed in different media (i.e. social media, print and television). 5. Research opportunities abound for exploring the role of emotions and the centrality of advertising in communicating information and fostering personal and emotional connections with buyers | |
| 1. Claim for a longitudinal study and conduct cross-industry comparisons. 2. Analyze frequency of use and the type of technology usage as moderators. Researchers are encouraged to examine other organizational and individual factors that could enhance or diminish the effects of sales technology on salesperson information exchange behaviors and the resulting buyer responses | |
| 1. Value chains are likely to involve more than two organizations that span both national and/or cultural boundaries. Thus, exploring the relationship marketing dynamics (as reflected in the conceptual model) within the context of a broader network of value chain participants to provide an even more comprehensive picture. 2. Explore drivers of Psychological Contract Breaches (one party’s perception of relational obligations that need to be undertaken by the other party). 3. Explore how cultural context influences Psychological Contract Breaches | |
| 1. Collect more data, consider longitudinal designs for studies and replicate in other countries. 2. Consider other values both positive and negative in business purchasing. 3. Explore value congruency in the two partners organizations. 4. Incorporate the concept of organizational culture and norms for a more holistic understanding of business purchase decisions. 5. What are the values portrayed by goods and services and their influence on business purchase decisions? 6. Incorporate quality or satisfaction aspects of business purchase decisions. 7. Compare the results across personal and organizational demographic items and between private vs public organizations. 8. Conduct case studies across several organizations and sample employees at different hierarchical levels in organization | |
| 1. Test the motivations of buyers to establish long-term relationships or safeguard their investments. 2. How suppliers react to the proposed governance mechanism by the buyer, especially when they are planning on making substantial investments in the relationship? 3.Use field or laboratory experiments and case studies can provide more in-depth insights into the intricacies of the different types of buyer and supplier investments and short- and long-term relationship governance considerations | |
| 1. Future studies can use longitudinal data, explore the interactive effects of contractual and relative governance differentiation strategies on firms' value appropriation (VA). 2. Investigation of possible moderating effects on the relative governance–VA link. 3. Future studies should differentiate between two types of trust (i.e. goodwill- and capability-based), two types of justice (i.e. procedural and distributive) and two types of opportunism (i.e. strong form and weak form) | |
| 1. Explore how opportunism develops in contractual negotiation. 2. The willingness to invest in a relationship could be replaced by charting actual investments in a trading partner, and expectations of continuity could be replaced with a longitudinal measure of relationship longevity | |
| 1. Are informal social capital networks in emerging countries similar in structure? 2. What facets of informal networks mostly influence commitment between members under distinct institutional and cultural contexts? 3. Are there universal strategies to improve social and business relationships across distinct emerging markets? | |
| 1. How can supplier firms engage productively with buyer firms to develop a clear vision for customer solutions development and delivery? How can supplier firms develop the necessary capabilities to lead customer solutions development and delivery? How can supplier firms integrate diverse offerings from multiple suppliers for innovative, future-oriented customer solutions? How can supplier firms determine when to engage in customer solutions development? 2. What contractual forms are most likely to create cross-functional integration to affect a seamless customer experience? How can supplier firms address the need for customer alignment as both a strategic and interpersonal phenomenon? How can suppliers use processes, procedures and other infrastructure to support cross-functional alignment, noting the fluidity of functional definitions? 3. How can B2B relationships serve as a platform for addressing societal problems? How can agency problems be overcome to encourage a societal-level awareness of B2B relationships? What are the appropriate societal mechanisms (e.g. regulation) that could encourage more responsible B2B relationships? How can we conceptualize sustainability performance at the service ecosystem/ network level? How can zero waste production, transport and exchange processes integrate into B2B relationships? 4. How can B2B firms develop customer solutions for customers that operate in different market contexts, noting the challenges above? How can B2B relationships promote strong linkages with customers in emerging markets? How can B2B collate, analyze and understand diverse information and distribute it to appropriate stakeholders seamlessly? |
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