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This paper reports the results of a three-year-long research on business relationships, relying on qualitative data gathered through multiple-case study research of four focal companies operating in Australia. The industry settings are as follows: steel construction, vegetable oils trading, aluminum and steel can manufacture, and imaging solutions. The research analyzes two main aspects of relationships: structure and process. This paper deals with structure describing it by the most desired features of intercompany relationships for each focal company. The primary research data have been coded drawing on extant research into business relationships. The main outcome of this part of the research is a five construct model composed by trust, commitment, bonds, distance, and information sharing that accounts for all informants’ utterances about relationship structure.

The concept of trust suffers from conceptual confusion. The current perspectives on trust within the B2B marketing domain could be visualised as a big box of which the borders are defined by the disciplines marketing, economics, psychology and sociology. The purpose of this paper is to enlarge the box by introducing neuroscientific insights on trust to the B2B marketing domain.

By a literature study on neuroscientific insights on trust, this paper examines how neuroscience can help to solve existing problems within trust research and how it can address problems that otherwise might not be considered.

The neural coordinates of trust not only show that trust entails cognitive and affective elements, but also that these elements are so intertwined that they cannot be completely separated. What can and should be separated are the concepts of trust and distrust: the neural coordinates of trust are clearly different from the neural coordinates of distrust. Furthermore, there are personal differences in the ease of trusting others, which are not only caused by previous experiences but also by differences in resting patterns of frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and by differences in hormonal state.

Specifically, the neural difference between trust and distrust might shape the future research agenda for trust research within industrial marketing. It is likely that the process of distrust goes quick, whereas trust comes more slow. This is reflected in the dual processing theory, which is seen as a paradigm shift in the psychology of reasoning.

New perspectives and directions for trust research are presented. The distinction between trust and distrust is connected to approach- and avoidance-motivated behaviour, which is highly relevant for deepening the studies on trust within industrial marketing.

This paper aims to examine the relationship among trust, commitment and ego involvement and their impacts on word-of-mouth communication (WOM) for individual saving customers in Islamic banking.

The conceptual model and the hypotheses are formulated based on trust and commitment theory, organizational commitment theory, social judgment theory and the results of previous empirical studies on buyer–seller marketing relationship in business-to-customer (B2C) markets. Quantitative research methodology was performed to examine the model and the hypotheses. The data were collected using survey with questionnaire. The respondents of the survey are 100 Islamic banking individual saving customers. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the proposed model and the hypotheses.

The research results show that affective commitment has a positive and significant impact on WOM, while normative commitment and calculative commitment have no significant impact on WOM. Ego involvement has a positive and significant impact on trust, normative commitment, calculative commitment and affective commitment. However, trust does not have a significant impact on calculative commitment, normative commitment and affective commitment.

This research was only conducted in one Islamic bank in Indonesia. The data collection using the convenience sampling method as well as the use of a small sample size caused the limitation of the research results in representing across the retail customer of the bank. This study can be replicated with a larger sample size and by involving more Islamic banks to examine the stability of the findings.

The research results indicate that ego involvement has an important role in shaping trust and commitment of Islamic banking individual saving customers. Given this, the managements of Islamic banks need to ensure that the banks they have managed are relevant, important and appropriate with the values espoused by their individual customers.

This study is important because of the limited literature which discusses relationship marketing in the context of Islamic banking. Furthermore, this research has a novelty on the inclusion of ego involvement in explaining trust and commitment. The use of commitment as a multi-attribute construct also enriches the literature on buyer–seller marketing relationship in B2C markets due to the limited literature that addresses commitment as a multi-attribute construct.

This study aims to examine how the appraisal of both incidental and direct positive other-agency emotions (vs self-agency emotions) enhances brand trust and, subsequently, brand attitudes.

The paper presents three experiments that examine the effect of other-agency emotions (vs self-agency emotions) on brand trust and brand attitudes by both Australian and USA consumers. Studies 1 and 2 compared the effect of self- and other-agency emotions evoked through an irrelevant reflective task. Study 3 used real-world marketing communication to evoke self- or other-pride.

Gratitude (Study 1) and other-pride (Study 2) evoked through an irrelevant, reflective task enhanced brand trust and attitudes for both familiar and unfamiliar brands. The authors replicated these effects using marketing communications that evoked other-pride (Study 3) and showed how these findings can be applied in a marketing context.

There are contradictory findings in the literature on how positive emotions influence brand trust and attitudes. The findings show that other-agency appraisal is a crucial appraisal within a marketing context and reveals why not all positively valenced emotions increase brand trust and brand attitudes. The findings highlight the importance of examining the effects of emotions on brand trust and attitudes beyond the consideration of their valence.

The research provides significant implications for marketers to improve brand trust and brand attitudes through the elicitation of other-agency emotions. The findings also demonstrate that different components of emotions, such as appraisal structure, may influence consumer trust and attitudes towards marketing and branding communications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to empirically demonstrate how other-agency appraisals of emotions can influence consumer brand trust and attitudes in a marketing context.

The primary purpose of this article is to introduce the special issue on trust in marketing and the selected papers. However, it has a secondary objective of acting as a brief introduction to the concept of trust, of highlighting the scope and scale of research into the concept in a range of disciplines, and of stimulating more research in areas identified as still being under‐explored.

This is a discursive paper based on analysis and synthesis of trust literature and of submissions to the special issue.

This paper finds that despite a broad spectrum of disciplines that investigate trust, and despite this special issue in the area of marketing, there are still areas open for research into trust in marketing, for example the role of trust in a B2C context, the impact of indirect (referent) experience versus direct experience of levels of trust, and exploring the concept using more interpretivist or phenomenological approaches.

The historical synthesis provides researchers new to the field with some foundational literature. For those interested in current thoughts, the discussion provides a synthesis of the areas represented by the paper in this special issue. For those interested in new areas it offers suggestions as to some possibilities.

The value of the paper lies in linking the special issue articles to areas of current interest and the identification of under‐researched areas of trust in a marketing context.

In the agri-food industries, particular importance is given to distribution. Indeed, maintaining good relationships with distributors is a necessity for industries seeking sound marketing performance. In this context, Moroccan agri-food companies recognize the importance of developing customer loyalty. They focus on maintaining good relationships based on trust with their distributors. Considerable research has investigated trust in business-to-business (B-to-B) relationships; however, research in the agri-food industry needs further investigation. Indeed, some past research studied the effect of benevolence on loyalty (Chen, 2008; Rampl, Eberhardt, Schütte & Kenning, 2012) but they ignored studying the effect on two types of loyalty – attitudinal and behavioral – in agri-food industries.

The paper here contributes to the literature in a number of meaningful ways. First, we explore loyalty strategies used by agri-food industries to maintain distributors. This enables us to better understand how trust can boost agri-food B-to-B relationships and distributor’s loyalty. We also investigate exactly the trust dimension (benevolence; credibility) that affects more loyalty in the agri-food industry. A better understanding of the trust dimension should provide practical guidelines as to how to facilitate loyalty in B-to-B relationships. In addition, we test the two dimensions of loyalty and the importance of the attitudinal one. Using structural equation modeling to analyze data, our findings confirm the importance of benevolence in relationships between Moroccan agri-food industries and their distributors. Indeed, the results explain that the development of customer loyalty is influenced by the development of benevolence in relationships with distributors, especially on attitudinal loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of service separation on the ability of service firms to build and maintain customer relationships, by exploring the differences in the strength of interrelationships among key relational constructs between separated and unseparated service delivery modes.

A field survey was conducted with retail banking customers in Saudi Arabia (n=592) using a structured self-administered questionnaire consisting of well-established scales. Data were analyzed using AMOS 24.

Service separation negatively moderates (weakens) the ability of the service firms to leverage their social benefits, relational trust and affective commitment to increase customer loyalty and to strengthen overall customer relationships.

This study uses retail banking customers in Saudi Arabia to test the impact of service separation in their relationship with the bank; hence, its findings may not be generalizable to other types of services and cultural settings.

Service firms using online and mobile technologies should be aware that trust and commitment remain key to building customer loyalty. Hence, the trade-off between the benefits of these technologies and their negative impact on customer relationship needs to be factored into managerial decision making.

The paper highlights the importance of maintaining face-to-face interactions with service customers to create robust relationships that yield loyalty, despite the growing popularity of online and mobile technologies.

The paper aims to present a comprehensive framework for understanding consumer trust in a corporate brand, incorporating both the antecedents and consequences of trust. The paper also seeks to account explicitly for the differences in antecedents and consequences of trust found among customers and among non‐customers.

Data were obtained from 308 face‐to‐face interviews conducted in Germany. Structural equation modelling was used in order to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results indicate that competence and credibility have a high explanatory power as antecedents of trust. Trust has a considerable impact on supplier selection for existing and new products, as well as on the word‐of‐mouth (WOM) behaviour of consumers. There are strong differences between customers and non‐customers in terms of the antecedents and consequences of trust in a corporate brand.

In order to generalise the findings, the model needs to be tested with other samples and research objects. Marketing research into trust should focus on competence and credibility as important antecedents of trust. The findings propose that trust has positive effects on purchase intention and WOM behaviour. Marketing research should pay more attention to the role of trust in gaining new customers.

Because of the positive influence on marketing success, managers should focus on trust‐building activities that centre on competence and credibility primarily with current customers. However, trust also seems to be a good device to gain customers from competitors.

The contributions of the paper are, firstly, a more complete framework of trust that analyses both antecedents and consequences of trust simultaneously. Secondly, the study allows a direct comparison of the difference in antecedents and consequences of trust between customers on the one hand and non‐customers on the other.

In the last perhaps ten years the interest of marketing research in the subject of trust increased dramatically. Although well known in several scientific disciplines, in marketing research trust is often conceptualized without the concept of general trust. Therefore, one main aim of this paper is to broaden marketing research understanding of trust by showing how general trust (which has the character of a personal trait) and, in comparison, specific trust (which is associated with a specific retailer) affects buying behaviour.

After a review of trust‐literature the paper identifies two subcategories of trust, which might be relevant for buying behaviour: general trust and specific trust. It then aims to test their influence on retail food buying behaviour empirically. To do so, it uses for the first time in marketing research the ITS‐Rotter‐scale for measuring general trust.

The results, including data from about 331 subjects in the German food‐retailing market, indicate that general as well as specific trust positively affects buying behaviour. In contrast to expectations, it was found general and specific trust to be unrelated. Moreover, it was found that, the influence of specific trust on buying behaviour increases when customers scored lower on the ITS‐Rotter‐scale indicating lower levels of general trust.

This paper is the first in marketing literature which integrates the concept of general trust and uses the ITS‐Rotter‐scale for measuring general trust in a marketing related context. Accordingly, it provides for the first time evidence on the positive influence of general trust on buying behaviour. It shows that general trust is able to substitute lacking specific trust.

The key objective of this research is to test how two trust dimensions (cognition‐based trust and affect‐based trust) mediate the effects of three personal characteristics (psychological distance, the marketing manager's sales experience, and the marketing manager's relative level of formal education) on the following outcome variables: dysfunctional conflict, functional conflict, and perceived relationship effectiveness.

Drawing on the interaction approach, the paper develops a conceptual framework to better understand the nature of the working relationship between marketing managers and sales managers. In total, it develops and test 13 hypotheses. Partial least squares was used to assess the validity of the measures, and to estimate the structural model. Using a cross‐sectional design, data were collected from 101 marketing managers in Australia.

The hypothesized model has high explanatory power and it was found that both trust dimensions strongly affected all three outcome variables. However, though both forms of trust were positively related to perceived relationship effectiveness, affect‐based trust had the strongest impact on this outcome. The results also confirm that both cognition‐ and affect‐based trust have negative effects on dysfunctional conflict, and strong positive effects on functional conflict. In addition to these new findings, the paper shows that while psychological distance has a strong negative impact on cognition‐based trust, it has no impact on affect‐based trust. Moreover, it was found that when marketing managers had greater levels of sales experience, it increased their affect‐based trust but it had no impact on cognition‐based trust. Finally, the marketing manager's relative level of formal education had no impact on either forms of trust.

This is one of a handful of studies to employ a large‐scale empirical approach to examine the neglected cross‐functional relationship between marketing and sales. Also, it is one of the few studies to examine the effects of cognition‐based trust and affect‐based trust on performance outcomes.