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The unprecedented changes in the marketplace induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant accelerated corporate migration to virtual ecosystems have added several unique research opportunities and theoretical gaps, especially in business-to-business (B2B) small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) markets in the service sector. Particularly, customer interactions in B2B services that were once sustained by the “people mix” now demand a huge overhaul in light of the “new normal” restrictions. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore how B2B service firms can engender firm value through virtual customer interactions during and in the post-COVID-19 era from an SME’s perspective.

This study adopts an exploratory qualitative inquiry to contribute to this discourse by proposing a conceptual framework based on prior literature and relevant theoretical frameworks, as well as qualitative interviews with SME managers, CEOs and/or owner-managers.

The qualitative findings reveal organizational preparedness, empathy, digital content and trust as key enablers of effective B2B virtual interaction that enhances cocreated value, thereby augmenting firm value. This study offers a much-needed examination of virtual interaction in B2B contexts and proposes a business customer virtual interaction model.

The exploratory nature of this study is one limitation, and future studies with a bigger representative sample size that uses survey or experimental data drawn from large enterprises might add value to the current findings. Also, while this study is conducted in dynamic markets due to the COVID-19 crisis, future research must examine the customer/firm’s experiences in other forms of crises-led market ecosystems.

B2B service firms must be strongly inclined to continuously take steps to develop and maintain virtual interaction with customers. Proactive efforts to familiarize internal and external stakeholders with virtual interaction platforms are a crucial step for effective customer engagement. The effectiveness of B2B virtual interactions can be strengthened through digital content that elicits trust and exhibits empathy, especially in crises led-markets. Also, the value created for the firm must be redeployed strategically to sustain positive customer engagement behaviors that continue to deliver value to the firm and the customer.

This paper contributes to the increasing B2B customer engagement literature by exploring the ongoing dialogue on how B2B firms can strive and succeed in the post-COVID-19 era or related crises-led market ecosystems through enhanced virtual B2B customer interaction efforts.

This study aims to investigate business-to-business (B2B) engagement within an internet of things (IoT) ecosystem. A conceptual framework is proposed that can be used for building engagement strategies considering key actors within an IoT ecosystem.

The study used an integrative literature review as a research method and investigated engagement across several disciplines along with antecedents and outcomes of engagement to form an understanding of IoT engagement.

The findings in this study revealed IoT engagement antecedents as IoT readiness, commitment, communication, involvement and support and, consequently, the outcomes of IoT engagement as trust, loyalty, better performance and satisfaction. Furthermore, IoT engagement needs to be considered from three perspectives, namely, from a multidimensional perspective, beyond a dyad perspective and from the service-dominant logic perspective, which suggests thinking of goods as services and highlights the importance of value co-creation.

As the study of B2B engagement within the IoT ecosystem is conceptual, empirical investigations are suggested for elaborating on the findings.

The conceptual framework provides managers within an IoT ecosystem with thorough recommendations on why to change their perspectives toward engagement; it points out drivers of engagement that need to be maintained and adds IoT readiness as a new antecedent to engagement literature.

This study contributes a coherent conceptualization of actors’ engagement within IoT ecosystems and enhances both the theoretical and practical domain of B2B engagement.

Digitalisation has increased the importance of online forms of marketing, including social media (SM) marketing, for entrepreneurial firms. This paper aims to identify digital engagement strategies and tactics in developing SM marketing capability.

The study uses ethnographic content analysis of an entrepreneurial firm and a network of business-to-business (B2B) actors to classify 1,248 B2B Facebook posts and Twitter tweets from a case of an artisan food producer in addition to semi-structured interviews with 26 networked actors.

The authors derive a range of digital engagement strategies (8 in total) and tactics (15 in total) for the four defining layers of SM marketing capability, namely, connect, engage, co-ordinate and collaborate.

This research focuses on a case study and a network of B2B actors within the artisan food sector. However, the strategies and tactics are applicable to other entrepreneurial firms and contexts.

The digital engagement strategies and tactics are of direct practical benefit to entrepreneurial firms willing to learn and develop SM marketing capability in interaction with their B2B partners.

This study investigates three under-researched areas, SM as it relates to B2B relationships, and entrepreneurship, and marketing capability gaps in an era of rapid digitalisation. The definition of SM marketing capability and associated digital engagement strategies and tactics are new to the extant literature moving forward the understanding of SM B2B marketing in theory and practice.

This paper studies, based on the theory of service-dominant logic, the effect of value co-creation practices (linking and materializing) on engagement dimensions (popularity, commitment and virality). The main objective is to analyze the influence of value co-creation practices on engagement at international trade shows organizer association on Twitter.

This paper studies the usage of Twitter by the Specialty Food Association, which organizes one of the top five foods and beverage international trade show in the United States. To achieve the research objective, the authors have analyzed 1,608 posts on Twitter from the Twitter account @Specialty_Food. A content analysis was performed using Krippendorff's (2004) recommendations, and the data were analyzed using regression analysis with optimal scaling and Kruskal–Wallis Test.

According to the results, some materializing practices influence popularity, commitment, virality and global engagement on Twitter. While the usage of some linking practices influences respectively commitment and popularity.

These results provide valuable information for business-to-business (B2B) contexts and answer a research gap reported in previous literature, which affirms that more research is needed about the relationship between service systems and engagement. From a general view, to generate more engagement on social media in B2B contexts, it is recommended to prioritize posts that incorporate live and online events based on collaborative and dynamic human interactions, following by business ideas and business cases.

This study aims to offer a mid-range theory conceptualization of factors central to understanding and facilitating business actor engagement (BAE). Reports on a study of real estate companies and their sustainable development goal (SDG) driven business initiatives. The aim is to identify the factors that need to be in place to facilitate positive engagement amongst actors in business-to-business (B2B) settings.

A case study of real estate companies (landlords of business premises) and their business customers (tenants of offices and warehouses) – comprising interviews and workshops – offer insights related to the factors that need to be in place to facilitate BAE types and outcomes.

The identified central factors of BAE – needed to understand and facilitate positive engagement to unfold – are the actors’ perception of: willingness (to act), resourcefulness (to contribute and solve issues) and influence (to affect decisions) regarding solutions related to the business initiative at hand. Failing to facilitate these factors may result in negative outcomes of BAE where “engagement” merely constitutes perceived obligations and responsibilities.

The study offers theoretical and managerial insights on how to manage the factors needed for BAE. It also sheds light on how actors can use SDG-driven business initiatives to achieve sustainability goals.

It contributes to the concept of BAE, by emphasizing the dynamics of engagement, from the motivational and behavioral dimensions specific to B2B settings. It offers insights how to managerially cogovern rather than control BAE. It presents central factors needed to include and capacitate customers, facilitating successful implementations of SDG-driven business initiatives to reduce absent or negative outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to close the gap between the theoretical nature of existing contributions in customer engagement value (CEV) and its need to practically empower business decisions. This is done by proposing a framework that consists of three techniques, each of which combines the components of CEV to make it more comprehensive and applicable. The paper also reviews and analyzes the work that has been done so far in the area of CEV whether in business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C) or consumer to consumer (C2C) markets.

CEV is a comprehensive term that measures the total value of the customer through capturing his transactional and non-transactional behaviors. Hence, it is an essential term for measuring the value of the customer in direct marketing. This motivates researchers to compete in developing models to maximize CEV. Meanwhile, most of the existing models are conceptual and the majority of them lack applicability due to many reasons. First, these models relied on a linear version of the CEV model, hence double-counting the value of the customer; also they weighted the components of CEV equally, which is unrealistic. Finally, the effect of the environmental components in determining the engagement level of each customer was almost ignored. In this paper, two main contributions are presented. First, a summary and analysis of the contributions of the literature in the CEV field for different market types whether in B2C, B2B or C2C. Furthermore, three modifications are added to the existing models. The first model introduces a non-linear relationship of the components of CEV. The second model is a weighted linear model of these components. Finally, the third model adds the environmental factors to the CEV components. All the proposed models are theoretical in nature, however, these models are expected to show superiority when being applied to real data sets due to their ability to capture the complexity in the relationship between the firm and its customers in real-life situations. The proposed models are expected to attract the practitioners and other researchers and they both are encouraged to apply the proposed models on real-life data sets, test their performance, compare them against each other, to be able to apply each of them on the best suitable data set and business scenario.

Based on the review and analysis that has been done on about 87 papers, it is found that the majority of the contributions that have been done in the area of CEV are theoretical in nature, in spite of the effectiveness of CEV in empowering business decision. It is also found that few researchers proposed a set of theoretical comprehensive frameworks that combined CEV’s components together. Meanwhile, those frameworks are not practically applicable.

Although the contribution of the proposed models expected to attract both researchers and practitioners, these are not applied to real-life case studies to prove their effectiveness.

The research in this paper has many industrial and managerial implications. First, it helps managers and decision takers to treat the customers as assets and cost-free resources who can work with the firm to achieve what’s both aims to (i.e. increase customer satisfaction and firm’s profitability). Second, it helps the firm to determine the total value of each customer and treat its customers accordingly. Third, it empowers the managers to do target marketing, based on grouping the customers upon their total engagement. This would save time and cost and for sure increase the profitability and customer satisfaction. Forth, the proposed models take into consideration not only the transactional behavior of the customers but also the non-transactional factors that play a significant role in formulating the relationship between the firm and its customers.

This is hereby to certify that the paper is original, neither the paper nor a part of it is under consideration for publication anywhere else. Also, this study has no conflicts of interest to disclose.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the drivers of business-to-business (B2B) sales success and the role of digitalization, in a selling and sales management landscape being disrupted by COVID-19.

The methodology follows a discovery-oriented grounded theory approach, which consists of a two-stage qualitative study with sales professionals in Chile, and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

This research shows that interfunctional coordination, agility in the selling process and business customer engagement are critical determinants of B2B sales success, whereas digitalization moderates these relationships.

This research responds to a call for more research on the impact of digitalization on business relationships in different contexts and perspectives. The authors study the Chilean context, through a two-stage qualitative study, and a fsQCA analysis, which constitutes a novel combination in this stream of research.

The main purpose of this study is to fill the research gap on how B2B global service firms integrate dynamic capabilities within their omnichannel management to influence positive word of mouth (WOM), customer engagement (CE) and customer equity.

Drawing on the dynamic capability and WOM theories, a model has been developed that defines the subjects of the empirical test. The paper reports on data collected from 312 service-oriented global firms in Australia, through a cross-sectional survey. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The findings suggest that content management (i.e. information consistency, source trustworthiness and endorsement) and concerns management (i.e. privacy, security and recovery) capabilities are the two significant antecedents of positive WOM within a B2B omnichannel setting in international marketing. The findings also confirm the key mediating role of CE between positive WOM and customer equity.

The findings extend dynamic capability theory in the context of international marketing by linking WOM, CE and customer equity. The findings add further theoretical rigor by establishing the nomological chain between positive WOM and customer equity, in which CE plays a key mediating role.

This paper highlights the suitability, application and fruitful opportunities for ethnographic methodologies in contemporary B2B service research.

This paper is based on a literature review and conceptual analysis of ethnographic research methodology and B2B service literatures.

This paper discusses the central features of ethnographic research methodologies, their key differences to other qualitative methodologies, key trends in contemporary B2B service research and opportunities for ethnographic research methodologies in selected priority areas.

This paper highlights the opportunities, unique strengths and specific advantages of ethnographic research methodologies to advance B2B service research and theory development.

This paper encourages B2B firms to undertake ethnographic field projects to better understand customers’ roles, experiences and usage processes that relate to B2B services.

Ethnographic research approaches have been largely overlooked or neglected in B2B service research. This paper highlights their potential, suggests areas for application and encourages B2B service researchers to adopt ethnographic approaches to delve deeper into the social and cultural aspects of B2B services

Business organizations are evermore expected to behave conscientiously, but a lack of clarity remains regarding this strategy for business-to-business (B2B) brands. This paper aims to develop and validate a B2B brand conscientiousness model that identifies what factors are driving this approach.

The research model is validated through a three-stage study that collects insights from high-level executives, mid-level managers and employees in B2B firms. Whereas the first two exploratory stages follow a qualitative approach to identify what factors motivate B2B firms to be conscientious and develop a model, the third stage empirically tests the proposed model through structural equation modeling.

The results suggest that brand conscientiousness is viewed as an important strategy by B2B stakeholders. Whereas perceived risk discourages, external and internal stakeholder expectations and a firm’s financial commitment to a cause encourage, brands to pursue a conscientious approach. Furthermore, a B2B conscientious strategy must be perceived as authentic. Long-term commitment to the cause, strategic alignment of brand values with the cause and a congruent delivery of the brand’s promise are the drivers of this perceived authenticity.

This paper contributes to the emerging knowledge on B2B conscientious brands by confirming the importance of this approach in a B2B context, identifying the factors that B2B stakeholders – executives, managers and employees – believe are driving it and highlighting the importance and identifying the factors that drive its perceived authenticity.