Guest editorial

Citation

Rich, M.K. (2010), "Guest editorial", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 25 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2010.08025caa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Volume 25, Issue 3

About the Guest Editor

Michael K. RichAfter completing 27 years of steady advancement in industrial sales and marketing positions with such firms as Kennecott Copper, Eastman Kodak, Nordson, and Automated Packaging, Mike Rich left his position as Vice-President and General Manager of North-West Telecommunications in 1989 to initiate a career in academe. After securing a tenure-track position at California University of Pennsylvania, he entered and successfully completed the doctoral program in Marketing at the University of Pittsburgh at the age of 56.He is now a tenured Professor of Marketing at Southwest Minnesota State University, in Marshall. After developing a new undergraduate marketing course of study, he conceived, developed and implemented the Southwest Marketing Advisory Center – an organization employing senior-level marketing students to supply much-needed marketing research services for regional businesses and governmental organizations as well as financial compensation to students involved in the Center. The center has completed over 400 research projects at an average client cost of $8,000 for both commercial and governmental organizations. The Center enjoys annual revenues exceeding $150,000 from an average of 20 projects per year. These projects encompass activities ranging from business potential evaluations, customer attitude surveys, product perception studies, webpage and brochure design, to the design of strategic marketing plans.He has effectively completed numerous advising contracts in the fields of salesforce training, marketing research, and organizational development. He also appears as a motivational speaker at various business events. He has been active as a member of the national faculty for the American Marketing Association, leading seminars throughout the USA on several marketing topics.

Most years, the Center for Business and Industrial Marketing (CBIM), located on the campus of Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, hosts an academic workshop. Like most workshops, its success is in direct proportion to the effort generated by the participants to offer insightful papers on subjects of immediate interest to the remaining attendees. This Special Issue of JBIM features seminal works delivered at the workshop. Over the previous 13 years, this annual CBIM Atlanta meeting has permitted individuals concerned with business-to-business marketing to share ideas, some with empirical support and others in the conceptual stage, during the planned workshop sessions as well as informally during various opportunities to socialize.

The seven papers featured in this Special Issue have experienced revisions based on the collective thinking of the worldwide participation by noted academic scholars in the field of marketing. The workshop title, “Emerging frontiers within B2B marketing: understanding customer needs and managing the customer experience”, is sufficiently broad to permit most current subjects of interest to be included in the workshop sessions. The papers featured in this Special Issue likewise span a broad collection of B2B ideas and approaches. The global impact is noted with articles from authors located in Denmark, Hungary, Poland, and four from the USA:

1. 1.

   The first paper, by Michael Rich and Darrell Bartholomew of Southwest Minnesota State University, outlines the successful development of an undergraduate research consulting firm that has successfully offered needed research services initially to Southwestern Minnesota and now to organizations throughout the USA. The authors suggest that this approach offers a new frontier and can be a model for financing under-funded small rural universities while providing related work experience for undergraduate marketing students.

2. 2.

   The second paper, by Dale Wilson of Michigan State University, is designed to illustrate how clickstream data, collected from a B2B website and then analyzed using web analytics software, can be used to evaluate and improve B2B web site performance. A number of issues in the application of clickstream data and web analytics software are identified and discussed.

3. 3.

   The third offering, by Ken Lord and Pola Gupta of the University of Scranton, addresses a review of product-placement research in the consumer-marketing domain, comparing it to B2B placements and related reactions from stakeholders in that domain. This is accomplished by examining the acceptability of the practice for buying-center participants, and assesses recall, attitude and purchase-intention responses to B2B products placed in movie scenes.

4. 4.

   Jens Geersbro and Thomas Ritter from the Copenhagen Business School provide the fourth paper, discussing the concepts of uncertainty, ambiguity, and conflict in business networks in relation to firm performance. They argue that uncertainty, ambiguity, and conflict are useful concepts for understanding firm performance and the way companies cope with external barriers to their performance.

5. 5.

   By analyzing organizations as social actors and business relationships as social relationships, sociology can improve business relationship management, according to Tibor Mandjak and Zoltan Szanto of Corvinus University of Budapest and Bordeaux Business School in the fifth paper in this special issue.

6. 6.

   The sixth paper, by Wojciech Latusek of Polkomtel SA, in Warsaw, Poland, discusses discrete choice modeling as a means of analytical support for B2B relationship marketing using an example of cross-selling high-tech services to a large business customer. This example is also used to show how an algorithm of genetic binary choice (GBC) modeling, developed by the author, performs in comparison with major techniques currently used to analyze the financial impact of these different approaches on profitability of B2B relationship marketing operations.

7. 7.

   The seventh paper, by Jongkuk Lee and William Qualls of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focuses on a process through which channel stakeholders interact with each other to adopt a buyer-seller technology with the purpose of improving the efficiency of their supply chain. They examine how ongoing business relationships between channel stakeholders influence the process of buyer-seller technology adoption.

This has been an enjoyable process, albeit a long one, working with the authors to finalize this special issue. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which have added to the rigor of this issue.

Michael K. RichSouthwest Minnesota State University, Marshall, Minnesota, USA