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This study aims to explore what characteristics contribute to the definition of relevance in business-to-business (B2B) marketing research and how/why different strands of B2B marketing maintain or lose their relevance.

This study is conceptual. It adopts a performative-phenomenal standpoint for B2B marketing research and approaches relevance through the concept of episteme, which is considered pivotal for understanding this phenomenon.

This study proposes four axioms that define the characteristics of relevance in B2B marketing research and discusses their implications for scholars and practitioners. Consequently, an action plan for revitalizing B2B marketing research is developed, comprising learning and temporal dimensions, resulting in nine different relevance types.

The central argument put forward in this study is that different research strands of B2B marketing have deeply rooted epistemic underpinnings that influence their interpretation of relevance. Consequently, fostering dialogue between practitioners and scholars is considered necessary to sustain relevance in B2B marketing research. B2B scholars are urged to think beyond their subspecialized silos and acknowledge how the business environment and the various strands of B2B marketing congruently shape B2B marketing relevance, while also embracing research methods that bring them closer to business practice.

Marketing practitioners and academics continue to drift apart. This study puts forward three recommendations to bring marketing academics and practitioners closer together.

The study contributes to the B2B marketing literature by grappling with the theory-praxis gap and critically exploring what constitutes relevance in B2B marketing research.

This study aims to propose a conceptual framework based on organisational and environmental indicators of business-to-business sellers’ sales performance in services firms.

A descriptive research design was applied and data was gathered from 389 respondents across industries and different-sized services firms in Norway using a self-administered questionnaire.

Results show that the proposed six-dimensional framework of organisational and environmental indicators can be applied to manage seller–customer relationships in a business-to-business environment.

A six-dimensional framework of organisational and environmental indicators is tested successfully in services firms.

Increasingly, services firms will need to work closely with business-to-business sellers to proactively adapt to market changes through a co-creation approach to build long-term seller–customer relationships.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous study has focused on relationship marketing in business-to-business relationships that proposes a conceptual framework based on organisational and environmental indicators of business-to-business sellers’ sales performance in services firms.

This paper aims to focus on the influences of the COVID-19 pandemic on business-to-business (B2B) firms’ relationship initiation and customer relationship management in an under-explored and unique context of high-tech industrial microenterprises. The authors analyze the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the specific context of B2B relationship initiation and customer relationship management dynamics by examining Finnish B2B industrial microenterprises.

The paper uses exploratory in-depth case studies undertaken in three Finnish industrial microenterprises to analyze the influences of the COVID-19 pandemic on their new business relationship initiation and relationship management with the current customers.

The case firms quickly adjusted to the “new normal” and used a number of technological resources, including online meetings and three-dimensional demonstrations, among others. A key reason for this quick adjustment was them being microenterprises. However, despite this, lack of access to customer sites remained a hindrance as their products need to fit certain production processes, which cannot be done without physical visits. Furthermore, the development of trust with new customers, especially those based in emerging markets, was challenging due to the lack of physical meetings and site visits.

The research highlights the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic to B2B relationships and gives an account of the changing dynamics of relationship initiation and customer relationship management amid technological and societal disruptions. It also highlights the continued role of personal relationships and psychical meetings in such relationships. As such, the research informs B2B research that examines the role of personal relationships in B2B marketing.

The study offers industrial microenterprise executives insights into how to face and tackle COVID-19 driven challenges in B2B customer relationship management and how to integrate technological tools in relationship management practices while understanding where face-to-face meetings are indispensable.

The study demonstrates areas in which virtual tools can and cannot be substitutes for conventional means of B2B relationship initiation and customer relationship management across developed and emerging markets. It also highlights the specificities of industrial microenterprises and their business development and customer relationship management dynamics mechanisms, a research area that has been rather ignored by prior studies.

Currently, online chat is in common use in e-commerce. By adding social interaction to the online context, companies hope to increase customers’ purchasing intentions. However, previous studies have not investigated how social presence is embedded in online business-to-business (B2B) chat conversations between buyers and sellers. Moreover, the functions of online chat in B2B sales have not been investigated.

The data was collected at a case company over the course of four years, from which the authors analyzed 157 online chat conversations between buyers (n = 157) and sellers (n = 9) with a theory-driven thematic analysis. In addition, data from the company’s customer relationship management system was collected to specify buyer types.

The results reveal that social presence was embedded in online B2B chat via buyers’ interactive, affective and relationship maintenance responses. Social presence differed depending on the type of buyer, with only existing customers having relationship maintenance responses. E-commerce B2B chat functions can be described as multiple and changing depending on the buyer–seller relationship stage.

Having data only from one case company limits the results to one type of industry.

The results can be used in sales training and when developing online chat services.

Results bring scientific utility to B2B sales and marketing research, as the authors build a bridge between social presence, the existing theoretical model on B2B buyer–seller relationship development and online chat as a communication medium. Other researchers may use this understanding when exploring B2B buyer–seller interaction in different digitalized communication media.

The purpose of this paper is to develop Delphi methodology toward a holistic method for forecasting market change. Delphi methodology experienced its culmination in marketing research during the 1970s–1980s, but still has much to offer to both marketing scholars and practitioners in contexts where future market changes are associated with ambiguity and uncertainty.

This study revives the Delphi methodology by exemplifying how a recently developed framework on market change can be combined with the Delphi technique for data collection to support forecasting activities and research. The authors demonstrate the benefits of the improved methodology in an empirical study on the impact of the fifth generation of wireless communications technologies (5G) on the Finnish media market.

The developed methodological approach aids marketing scholars in categorizing and analyzing the data collected for capturing market change; and better guiding experts/respondents to provide holistic projections of future market change. The authors show that using a predefined theoretical framework in combination with the Delphi method for data collection and analysis is beneficial for studying future market change.

This paper develops Delphi methodology and contributes with a novel methodological approach to assessing market change.

While studies about business-to-business (B2B) relationships have mainly addressed buyer–supplier long-term exchanges, focusing on social outcomes such as trust, commitment and cooperation, there is little research that explores the social outcomes which stem from short-term B2B transactions. The purpose of this paper is to explain buyers’ intention to renew a contract after discrete and time-delimited transactions by suggesting a model that complements social exchange theory with theories of fairness. In detail, this study aims to determine how evaluations of economic and social outcomes are complemented by both procedural fairness and distributive fairness.

The hypotheses are tested in the social couponing industry with a survey of a sample of 199 firms purchasing advertising services from daily deal websites. Data are analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM).

The findings reveal direct effects of procedural fairness on social outcomes (satisfaction) and distributive fairness on the intention to renew a contract, negative moderating effect of procedural fairness on the relationship between economic outcomes (campaign effectiveness) and social outcomes (satisfaction).

In discrete, time-delimited transactions, high levels of procedural fairness may partially compensate for low levels of economic outcomes and prevent a reduction in social outcomes. Hence, when economic outcomes are influenced largely by external, uncontrollable conditions, the buyer seems to appreciate the supplier’s efforts to behave fairly.

Social outcomes matter even in discrete transactions and considerations of fairness should be integrated in the management of discrete transactions. Sharing economic outcomes fairly is not sufficient to secure the buyer’s intention to renew the contract.

This study proposes and tests a model that complements social exchange theory with theories of fairness and explains contract renewal in discrete, time-delimited transactions, encompassing both economic outcomes and social outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to create a model that compares the effects of product content differentiation and service content differentiation on small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) perceived importance of customer reference marketing in foreign markets.

A theoretical model is developed and tested through multiple regression and mediation analysis, on an effective sample of 188 Swedish SMEs.

The results show that foreign market business assignments characterized by differentiated services make companies relatively more dependent on relationship learning and customer reference marketing. By contrast, situations of differentiated product content correlate negatively with customer reference marketing.

Reference customers can function as vehicles for international expansion when marketing offerings are complex. The findings imply that in service settings, SMEs need to maintain learning regimes with foreign market customers to effectively use them as references to win new business.

The study applies a service perspective to explain the contingencies of customer reference marketing, particularly in international business settings. The study contributes to international small business literature and research focusing on service–firm internationalization by explaining the marketing mechanisms at play in the internationalization of SMEs. In so doing, the findings can enrich relationship and network perspectives of internationalization and add a missing link to studies on networking and internationalization.

The paper addresses the following research question: how do decision-makers use heuristics in their international business (IB) environment? Whereas, the literature has focused on entrepreneurial companies, here contrasting approaches to learning and using heuristics in international marketing (IM) decisions are examined and discussed.

The paper aims to address a gap in the study of micro-foundations of internationalization, exploiting research from other disciplinary fields. It combines a multidisciplinary literature review and longitudinal case studies to illustrate different approaches in learning and using heuristics by international marketers.

International marketers can adopt “closed” heuristics that are consolidated and consistently followed, or “open” heuristics, which are constantly being adapted and learned. Established multinationals learn heuristics in international marketing decision-making, following both “closed” and “open” models.

This paper offers an original contribution by presenting different approaches not yet examined in the literature, focusing on how international marketers make decisions through learning and using heuristic rules. The focus is on established exporters, in contrast to the literature that has largely paid attention to the effectiveness of heuristics in new entrepreneurial firms.

This study aims to systematically review the literature on the use of customer value for the evaluation of inter-organizational performance, with a wide perspective embracing different contexts and settings.

Searching within the Scopus and ISI Web of Science databases, a systematic literature review has been conducted analyzing 41 papers published between 1991 and 2020.

Categorization of customer value and inter-organizational performance measures were developed and the main differences among different settings were discussed.

The results presented in this study may be helpful for practitioners and managers who, in the completion of their activities, have to maintain strong and frequent relationships with other organizations. In fact, practitioners and managers interested in enhancing customer value and measuring inter-organizational performance may find an innovative perspective linking the two dimensions. They could find the categorizations presented in this study as a starting point for developing a performance evaluation framework suitable for evaluating their present business relationships. In fact, the categorizations provide a panorama of how scholars have measured until now inter-organizational performance through customer value, and therefore, they could choose the measures more appropriate for their situation.

No systematic literature review of the use of customer value for assessing inter-organizational performance has previously been undertaken, especially considering different settings.

This study aims to map the conceptual structure and evolution of the recent scientific literature published in marketing journals to identify the areas of interest and potential future research directions.

The 100 most influential marketing academic papers published between 2018 and 2022 were identified and scrutinized through a bibliometric analysis.

The findings further upheld the critical role of emerging technologies such as Blockchain in marketing and identified artificial intelligence and live streaming as emerging trends, reinforcing the importance of data-driven marketing in the discipline.

The data collection included only the 100 most cited documents between 2018 and 2022, and data were limited only to Scopus database and restrained to the Scopus-indexed marketing journals. Moreover, documents were selected based on the number of citations. Nevertheless, the data set may still provide significant insight into the marketing field.

Influential authors, papers and journals identified in this study will facilitate future literature searches and scientific dissemination in the field. This study makes an essential contribution to the marketing literature by identifying hot topics and suggesting future research themes. Also, the important role of emerging technologies and the shift of marketing toward a more data-driven approach will have significant practical implications for marketers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study offering a general overview of the leading trends and researchers in marketing state-of-the-art research.