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Research on how social bonding between boundary spanners influences relationship outcomes in business-to-business (B2B) settings is sparse and controversial. This longitudinal study aims to close this gap and assess the impact of social bonding on the share of wallet and actual cross-buying behaviour.

B2B relationships between a manufacturer of light commercial vehicles and its customers were investigated. A random sample of fleet managers answered two telephone surveys.

Social bonding was found to affect both investigated relationship outcomes, share of wallet and cross-buying, through the generation of trust over and above the customer’s perceptions of value.

Only one product category was investigated in this study, and further research should explore boundary conditions for the relevance of social bonding in B2B.

Social bonding represents one lever (next to value perceptions) for building a competitive advantage in a B2B context. Relationship marketing activities that are intended to strengthen the development of social bonds between customers and account managers should be encouraged.

The authors provide clear evidence regarding the disputed impact of social bonding between boundary spanners on relationship outcomes in B2B relationships by testing its impact on real purchase behaviour and not only purchase intentions, as is the case in most published studies to date.

Researchers and practitioners have traditionally maintained that organizational buying requires rational decision-making. However, individuals at organizations make decisions daily applying a confluence of rationalizations and emotions. This study aims to address the roles of personal feelings, facts and emotional advertising content in the organizational decision-making process.

In two studies, the authors apply both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore emotional and cognitive reactions to advertising. In Study 1, depth interviews were conducted with marketing and advertising content developers from a Fortune 100 technology company. In Study 2, a web-based survey was sent out to a Fortune 100 company’s buyer panel.

Results suggest that advertising using emotion-based themes helps to foster brand engagement tendencies and advocacy for a brand. Findings also demonstrate that organizational status (C-level executive’s vs non-C-level employees) moderates the relationship between buyers’ reliance on facts and their receptivity to advertising using emotion-based themes, such that reliance on facts increases the appeal of emotional advertising.

This research contributes to the organizational buying literature by addressing the dearth of research on the role of emotions in organizational decision-making and providing insight into the role of advertising in business-to-business (B2B) decision-making.

These results imply that advertising incorporating emotion-based themes provide meaningful information to B2B buyers and is especially effective when targeted at buyers at higher levels in an organization.

B2B buying behavior has traditionally been considered a rational undertaking. This research explores how decision-making orientation and the presence of advertising using emotion-based themes help to foster engagement and advocacy for the brand.

This chapter documents the contributions in the business-to-business (B2B) marketing–buying literature that focus on implemented strategies in specific contexts. Research on implemented strategies often includes thick descriptions of how things actually get done over a period of weeks, months, or years including how decision makers make sense of situations, go about processing information, make choices, interact with other decision makers, participate in specific actions, and interpret events and outcomes. Research on implemented strategies favors “direct research” (Mintzberg, 1979) that includes multiple face-to-face interviews of the same and different participants in B2B processes over the course of days, week, months, or years. Direct research is inherently inductive theory-building and case-based data driven in its theory-empirical approach. Direct research includes applying a number of possible research methods and results in a number of advances in B2B implemented-strategy-in-context theory.

Organizational buying behavior has often been treated as a rational activity, even though humans are involved in the decision-making. Human decision-making often includes a complex cadre of emotions and rationalizations. Subsequently, organizational buyers may not only be driven by logic, testing and facts, but also by emotions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role that emotions play in organizational buying behavior.

In-depth interviews were conducted with marketing decision-makers for one of the most valuable brands in the world. The role that emotions play in the behavior of organizational buyers is elucidated from the perspective of these marketing professionals.

Emotions are prevalent at all stages in the organizational decision-making process and various discrete emotions fuel action tendencies among buyers. Efforts are made by marketers to strategically manage the emotions buyers experience.

Although organizational buyers must see the functional value of a product or brand, companies need to consider ways in which brands can connect with buyers on an emotional and personal level.

This paper contributes to the literature by offering insights into which discrete or specific emotions are most prominent in organizational buying behavior and how the manifestation of these emotions impact decision-making at each stage in the buying cycle.

This study aims to develop a framework for the action hierarchy of sustainability practices and financial performance and their optimal combination for supplier evaluation and selection in business-to-business (B2B) for the Indian manufacturing industry.

Through the extensive literature review followed by comprehensive interviews conducted using the Delphi methodology with professionals, this study attempts to represent the interactions of the sustainability practices and financial performance factors on B2B buying behaviour using a graph-theoretic approach.

The contribution of environmental, social, economic and financial performance to B2B buying behaviour is obtained quantitatively in the context of the Indian manufacturing industry.

This study considers inputs from the Indian manufacturing industry, which may vary significantly based on the type of industry and geographical locations.

This study provides a direction to prioritize their supplier evaluation and selection criteria for sustainability practices and financial performance with quantifiable rationale.

The study seeks to encourage manufacturing industries to plan their actions by quantifying the intangibles through a systematic approach.

To date, country-of-origin research has commonly explored structural relationships among country image (CI) constructs, together with attitudinal constructs, using a variety of halo, summary construct and flexible models, drawing on consumer samples. There has been no previous attempt to examine or synthesize these three models with respect to business-to-business (B2B) buying behavior. To fill this gap, this study reconceptualized these three models with B2B constructs using multi-cue settings and tested on B2B samples. This study aims to examine and estimate the relative impact of company- and country-specific images on B2B buyers’ evaluations of suppliers, and the direction of structural relationships with mediation among the constructs.

Data collection was administered through a web-based structured questionnaire. The final sample consisted of 276 purchasing managers. Structural equation modeling was used to test the study’s hypotheses.

Company image is significantly influenced by product country image (PCI) but not by overall CI. The existence of a significant relationship between PCI and perceived supplier performance in a multi-cue setting is an important new finding. In addition, company image significantly influences supplier performance and mediates the relationship between PCI and supplier performance. Among the three models that test structural relationships among CI and other constructs, the reconceptualized halo model fits the data best.

The study results revealed the contribution of company and country-related facets on B2B buyers’ perceptions of supplier performance while purchasing intermediate goods internationally. The significance of PCI on supplier performance emphasizes the strength of the industry sector within a country that may enable an industry to build a product-specific CI in international marketing.

This study advances the country-of-origin issue and debate concerning the strength of the country influence in the academic literature by addressing B2B buyers’ international purchasing behavior of intermediate goods. Additionally, the examination of multiple country facets, multi-cue settings and the CI influence structure in a single study, from a B2B perspective, offers a novel dimension to CI studies.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive overview of current research on customer behavior in the business-to-business (B2B) context and propose a research agenda for future studies. Despite being a relatively recent area of interest for academics and practitioners, a literature review that synthesizes existing knowledge into coherent topics and outlines a research agenda for future research is still lacking.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of 219 papers and using a text-mining approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, this paper enhances the existing knowledge of B2B customer behavior and provides a descriptive analysis of the literature.

From this review, ten major research topics are found and analyzed. These topics were analyzed through the lens of the Theory, Context, Characteristics and Method framework, providing a summary of key findings from prior studies. Additionally, an integrative framework was developed, offering insights into future research directions.

This study presents a novel contribution to the field of B2B by providing a systematic review of the topic of customer behavior, filling a gap in the literature and offering a valuable resource for scholars and managers seeking to advance the field.

Extant literature on business-to-business (B2B) has largely ignored studying multi-homing through a psychological lens. This paper aims to outline the results of three constituent studies, which were designed to reveal potential differences in multi-homers’ versus single-homers’ loyalty behaviors in a B2B and supply chain management (SCM) setting; identify factors that differentiate single-homers and multi-homers in these settings; and examine the relevance and effect of perceived risk on multi-homing behaviors.

In Studies 1 and 2, the authors used a questionnaire-based survey to capture the perceptions of 503 and 458 SCM experts, respectively. They then deployed AMOS v.21 to perform structural equation modeling. In Study 3, the authors used a mixed-methods approach to interview 18 SCM experts and then applied these insights to a survey with 242 SCM experts.

Study 1 reveals that multi-homers’ loyalty toward their preferred SP has a weaker effect on willingness to pay premium prices and share-of-wallet than single-homers’ loyalty. Study 2 establishes that several attitudinal factors distinguish multi-homers from single-homers in a loyalty framework. Study 3 concludes that perceived risk dimensions promote multi-homing intention, which in turn promotes multi-homing behavior.

Through empirical investigation, the present research succeeds in establishing that multi-homing is a concern for SPs, deciphering the attitudinal factors that distinguish multi-homers and single-homers in a loyalty framework, and confirming the influence of perceived risk dimensions on multi-homing. Thus, the study has several theoretical and practical implications for B2B services in emerging economies.

Drawing from the contingency model, this study aims to investigate the moderating effects of business-to-business (B2B) buyer personal characteristics on the relationship between sales activities and sales effectiveness.

As an application of engaged scholarship, this study leverages a years’ worth of sales activity and results from a Fortune 500 financial services company for 2,710 dyads; personal characteristics (i.e. geodemographics) were appended for the customers/prospects of the dyads. The data was analyzed with hierarchical regression, and subgroups were tested using the Chow test.

The results support that geodemographic segments – as a proxy for personal characteristics – moderate the strength of the relationship between selling activities and sales effectiveness. Overall, the results demonstrate that selling activities have varying impacts on sales effectiveness within geodemographic segments and buyclass scenarios.

While it has been long held that understanding the personal characteristics of the B2B purchasing decision-maker is critical for sales effectiveness, little guidance has been provided on how to accomplish this to scale. The present study provides a framework and process for practitioner operationalization.

This research contributes to the literature that has explored personal characteristics of buying center members. Additionally, the results suggest that personal characteristics of the purchase decision-maker may transcend business-to-consumer and B2B purchasing contexts.

In the literature on product branding, significant attention is given to brand equity in the consumer context, but relatively little attention is paid to the application of the concept in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Even less research exists on the role of brand equity in the retailing context. Retailers are often seen as irrelevant to the source of brand value, resulting in manufacturers not targeting retailers to help them build stronger brands. Potential occurs, therefore, for some channel conflict to exist between manufacturers and retailers. On the one hand, retailers tend to focus on building their own, private brands to differentiate themselves from other retail competitors and to increase their power in relation to manufacturer brands. At the same time, most retailers still need to create a good image in the consumer marketplace by selling famous, manufacturer-branded products. In other words, retailers often have to sell famous brands even if they would prefer to sell other brands including their own. Manufacturers tend to focus their brand-building efforts on the consumer market to entice consumers to insist that retailers stock their brands, rather than placing any real emphasis on building a strong and positive brand relationship with the retailer directly.