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This chapter covers a diverse range of alternative methods for capturing deep major account insights online. Increasingly in the twenty first century, B2B decision-makers remain abreast of industry innovations and product information through participation in online communities. Through using social mobile technologies businesses exchange product and service experiences online amongst peers not just vendor organisations. A key aspect of this chapter shares rationale for selection of a marketing versus research community, community objectives, online techniques to gain major account insights using big data, resourcing, integration with existing marketing systems and budgeting for ongoing maintenance of marketing communities supporting B2B sales and marketing initiatives. This chapter focuses on the emerging area of B2B sales activities for creation and management of online communities for Major Account management of energy supply customers. A case-based research strategy specifically honed towards sensemaking of major account activities through using B2B online communities in conjunction with emerging research methods is outlined and critiqued.

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.

This case study research report aims to include collecting additional field interviews with the original and additional executives participating in the original case study (on the Zaplet software applications firm) to enhance the interpretations by the original case study investigators as well as add‐in downstream events occurring after the original report. The focus of the study is to increase descriptive knowledge and understanding of innovation and diffusion processes in developing high‐tech disruptive software technologies.

The study includes an application of the long‐interview method and reinterpretation of original case data along with preparing and interpreting decision system analysis and chronological maps.

The reinterpretation and expansion of the original case study illustrate dramatic revisions in plans and implementing new applications following positive and negative responses by third‐parties and lead‐user customers to alpha and beta designs. Concrete field trials occur frequently in shaping where and how the firm goes about changing its direction. Third‐parties play critical roles in multiple time periods in shaping the firm's new product development direction.

The case study reanalysis and expansion are generalizable to innovation and diffusion theory and not to a specific population of firms.

The paper illustrates the wisdom of Tom Peter's dictum, “Put it to tin quickly” and Dwight Eisenhower's focus on improvising, “The plan is nothing, planning is everything.”

Formal sensemaking of what happened helps to destroy the myth that executives must have the resources before innovating. Resources follow vision and action (implementing) is the hidden and great lesson of this paper – what Tom Peters means when he writes about the value in creating a “skunk works” – using “borrowed” time, material, places, and creative juices to make things happen.

The principal objective here is to describe conceptual and research tools for achieving deeper sense‐making of what happened and why it happened –including how participants interpret outcomes of what happened and the dynamics of emic (executive) and etic (researcher) sense‐making.

This article uses a mixed research design including decision systems analysis, cognitive mapping, computer software‐based text analysis, and the long interview method for mapping the mental models of the participants in specific decision‐making processes as well as mapping the immediate, feedback, and downstream influences of decisions‐actions‐outcomes.

The findings in the empirical study support the view that decision processes are prospective, introspective, and retrospective, sporadically rational, ultimately affective, and altogether imaginatively unbounded.

Not using outside auditors to evaluate post‐etic interpretations is recognized as a method limitation to the extended case study; such outside auditor reports represent an etic‐4 level of interpretation. Incorporating such etic‐4 interpretation is one suggestion for further research.

Asking executives for in‐depth stories about what happened and why helps them reflect and uncover very subtle nuances of what went right and what went wrong.

A series advanced hermeneutic B2B research reports of a specific issue (e.g., new product innovation processes) provides an advance for developing a grounded theory of what happened and why it happened. Such a large‐scale research effort enables more rigorous, accurate and useful generalizations of decision making on a specific issue than is found in literature reviews of models of complex systems.

By the year 2000 over 1 billion people will be connected to the electronic network commonly known as the Internet. In 1995, the Internet can easily be accessed by anyone who has a reasonably configured PC with Netscape Mosaic software and a modem. This network constitutes a whole new marketplace in its own right. Already thousands of firms are marketing their products and services on the Internet. Asks will marketing change in this new electronic environment? Will firms and their networks change as they become involved in this new environment? Suggests there is some evidence that the traditional manipulation of the marketing mix has to be modified for the new environment, value chains may become multidimensional and significant disintermediation may occur as customers link directly electronically with their suppliers. Discusses these issues emphasizing transformation of firms and their networks as they move into the new electronic environment.

An information‐driven, techno‐economic paradigm based on the microprocessor has emerged and is having a direct impact on the formation and management of strategic alliances. Strategic alliances are being forged between members of the computing, telecommunications and media industries to develop a supporting information infrastructure. Technology from the new infrastructure will affect strategic alliance activity in most industry sectors. Presents a brief review of strategic alliance definitions and taxonomies. Analyses a case study of an international hotel group operating within the Australasian region using a selected strategic alliance taxonomy against a range of information and communication technologies. Presents some key findings relating to the implementation of these technologies and their impacts on forming and managing strategic alliances.