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Academics and market professionals appreciate the importance of relationship marketing for contemporary firms. Yet, relationship marketing strategies and tactics are context specific. Based on opinions expressed in an academic “think tank” held at Lake Menteith in Scotland and the use of an expert system, this paper reports how business relationships may develop in the future and the practices that should be used under certain scenarios. It concludes with recommendations of areas where further research activity in relationship marketing is required.

A response to Nigel Piercy’s commentary “Why it is fundamentally stupid for a business school to try to improve its RAE score”. Highlights the bureaucratic rationale and behavioural consequences of the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Asserts that the RAE distorts and controls the management, recruitment and operations of UK business schools.

This paper aims to highlight the value of adopting a middle‐range theory approach in conceptualizing and investigating marketing practices.

Building on the work of Merton, the paper discusses O'Driscoll's article on the role of paradoxes (both theoretical as well as methodological paradoxes).

The paper argues that it is important to rescue and stress the benefits that adopting a multi‐paradigmatic view has in providing a better understanding of current marketing practices.

This position allows one both to avoid the incommensurability “trap” of being “boxed” into the explanatory dimensions of the chosen paradigm and to develop a richer holistic view. The discussion is grounded on the Contemporary Marketing Practices (CMP) research project.

To show how the conceptual framework of the marketing discipline can be radically revised and rethought, to be better in tune with the realities of the producer‐consumer relationship in advanced societies in the twenty‐first century.

Commissioned as a viewpoint, with permission to “think aloud”.

Marketing thinkers need to broaden their horizons, look at the marketing phenomenon as consumers experience it, and be prepared to learn from research conducted far beyond the confines of conventional marketing theory. Specifically, the present‐day context of marketing demands increased attention to the relatively familiar concept of relationship marketing and the so far relatively unknown perspective called “critical marketing”.

There is much integrative work to be done in effectively integrating the wide range of theoretical inputs required to explain what “marketing” means today.

Though the rethinking advocated may be challenging for marketing practitioners, the readings cited provide means for marketing educators to build the conceptual frameworks into applicable research and useful learning.

A glimpse of the future.

This paper aims to contribute to conceptualization of destination image (DI) and shed light on the overlooked socio-cultural aspects of tourism along with recent technological changes. It endeavours to develop a framework to conceptualize DI formation considering socio-cultural, political, historical and technological influences.

Unlike the orthodoxy in tourism research, tourism phenomenon is approached from a wider social science perspective. To cast light on the progress in DI research, a critical literature review is followed by evaluation of the well-known DI formation frameworks in tourism literature. Seminal articles, cornerstones of DI studies, are critically discussed in this paper. While stressing the prominence of these studies, their shortcomings are also examined.

The paper introduces a novel framework of DI formation that helps bring DI research further through a wider socio-cultural perspective. The framework incorporates holistic characteristics of DI and the contemporary technological environment.

This paper proposes a nuanced and more holistic understanding of DI. While most of the previous studies overlooked socio-cultural, historical, political, economic and technological factors, they have been explicitly addressed in the framework proposed in this paper.

Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.

Business and customer relationships build on interactions between the parties. However, the marketing literature does not pay much attention to the concept of interaction. Interaction is a central construct of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group as a result of a strong empirical focus on interfirm relations. However, even this research does not strongly address the interaction construct. Interaction between parties in the economic world refers to the exchanges and communications between parties that lead to development of relationships.

While interaction occurs in the on-going present, the purpose is always about creating a future for each of the participants in the relationship. Based on the authors’ presentation at the International Colloquium in Relationship Marketing at Leipzig, Germany, in September 2006, this chapter presents a model of interaction within business and customer relationships that relies upon time and cognition to explain the formation of relationships (or atmosphere) through interactive cognitive processes. This model allows an analysis of the ways the future is shaped in different types of business and customer relationships, depending on the relative ability of the parties to have an effect on the future. The analysis shows how firms and customers work to slow down or speed up change. The final section of the chapter addresses the research implications.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest grounded theory as a potential methodology within the field of arts marketing and the creative industries in general, particularly if the research aims to gain insights into consumer experiences.

Grounded theory is a general, qualitative methodology that is concerned with social processes and interactions. The paper looks at the fundamental processes that grounded theory must follow and provides an example of applying grounded theory in the context of researching the Goths, an aesthetic subculture.

The paper suggests that within the creative industries there is scope for the wider application of inductive, theory‐building methodologies that aim to provide deeper understanding of behavior.

The value of the paper lies in detailing a systematic methodology that scholars may apply across the spectrum of creative and cultural marketing from music festivals to museums.

A large number of researchers and marketing textbooks see business marketing dominantly from the relationship marketing perspective. One can even talk about a “matrimony” of these domains; “RM=BM”. The Contemporary Marketing Practices studies, however, provide clear evidence of the coexistence of various marketing practices but offer no supporting theoretical rationale for these findings. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question whether business marketing and relationship marketing, when broadly defined to include all relational‐interactional perspectives, are necessarily wedded to each other.

A metatheoretical analysis was conducted to identify the contributions and limitations of the current research approaches to business marketing and a configurational approach for marketing (CAM) was developed, providing theoretical explanation for the empirical findings versus relationship dominance dilemma.

The metatheoretical analysis showed that research into business marketing relationships is not monolithic; that each tradition is useful for specific purposes, domains and activities; and that none helps understand why there are multiple ways in which firms relate to their markets. A conceptual CAM framework was developed that allows one to identify possible configurational marketing profiles (i.e. identifying different equivalently valid ways of relating to a business environment).

It is contended that the configuration approach for marketing permits other configurations to co‐exist beyond the RM‐BM matrimony. CAM provides a conceptual framework that can host the “puzzling” empirical results of the contemporary marketing practices studies.

The CAM frame suggests that managers should carefully examine the internal logic of their marketing‐related configuration. Performance should be enhanced if the three elements – managerial frame of reference, organization/environment relationship, marketing mode – are coherent.

The configurational approach for marketing helps one to understand why firms relate to the business marketing environment with a multiplicity of marketing modes, showing that the BM‐RM matrimony is but one possible configuration.

The concept of time is intrinsically linked to the conceptualization and empirical investigation of organizational processes such as customer relationship management (CRM). The purpose of this paper is to offer conceptual and methodological insights enabling the incorporation of temporal factors in the study of CRM.

A framework toward the integration of time into the study of CRM is proposed and discussed.

This framework, which consists of philosophical, conceptual, methodological and substantive domains, suggests that the locus of time is inherent in the conceptualization and empirical investigation of marketing phenomena.

CRM practitioners can emphasize crucial events of the firm‐customer relationship, which are likely to be associated with stronger rapport with customers.

The paper promotes more explicit thinking about the temporal dimension in relationship marketing. Second, it advances understanding of the CRM process, since buyer‐seller relationships are dynamic phenomena that embrace the concept of time.