Australasian Marketing Journal

The motivation behind this special issue is the growing interest in how firms and marketing practitioners can better manage their resources to improve firm performance and customer relationships. The special issue contains a range of theoretical and empirical articles that examine resource management from both the customer and supplier perspectives. The seven articles presented here address the topics of resource collaboration, social capital and resource dependency, accessing customer resources, resource mobilization, resource investment, the importance of social bonds, and inhibitors to resource collaboration.

In business markets, does strength of social bonds that a supplier perceives with a specific customer influence the supplier's allocations of resources relative to other customers? If social bonding does uniquely impact supplier allocation of resources to customers, does the impact vary by relationship duration? Relationship marketing and Homans’ framework for social behavior are the theoretical bases for the study, which uses survey data to examine three alternative models that indicate how suppliers’ perceptions of social bonds with customers influence the suppliers’ allocations of resources over time. Analysis of data from sales and marketing managers confirms that two of these models, the imprinting theory and the maturity theory, are relevant. The findings indicate that relationship managers need to take into account the clear effect that creation of strong social bonds in buyer–seller relationships, as distinct from financial bonds, has on the way in which suppliers allocate resources to those relationships and how relationship duration affects the way in which they do so. The study strengthens the argument, on a strong theoretical base, to adopt a collaborative, as opposed to a transactional, approach to buyer–seller relationships.

Companies depend on supplier resources and boundary spanning managers need to find suppliers, and combine and coordinate resource bundles in exchange. But adequate and fitting resource flows are not automatic, as suppliers allocate and activate their resources for more customers in their portfolio. Therefore, buying companies also need to influence supplier actors to prioritize and optimize resource flows into their specific exchange. Based on a theoretical basis comprising the literature on buyer-seller relationship, including resource based research of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group, as well as Dynamic Capabilities theory and the project management literature, this paper presents the results from a study of applied buying company resource mobilization routines. We report on a qualitative investigation of routines applied in complex construction projects in the North European offshore wind turbine industry. Complex construction/production projects are widespread global business phenomena, but knowledge of resource mobilization routines in this context is scarce in the literature. We find that the complex project owner (buying company) applies a series of 11 particular routines to mobilize resources for the wind turbine constructions and that several of these routines differ from the routines applied in conventional production exchanges.

For partners in buyer-seller relationships to work effectively in transmitting and integrating resources as well as for value creation, each partner needs to invest in the relationship and needs to make it easy for the other partner to access their resources. However, every investment is risky and it is not certain whether investment objectives will be achieved. Thus, this paper addresses the question of which factors drive intention to invest in a customer relationship from a supplier's perspective. We propose and test three factors as positive investment drivers: the relationship quality; the suppliers’ expectation of future access to their customers’ important and intangible resources; and the relationship value perceived by the supplier. By analyzing interview and survey data from managers, the study finds support for the propositions. Relationship value and expectation of future access to the customers’ resources have direct effects on suppliers’ intentions to invest. Relationship quality also has a strong effect, mediated by the other two drivers.

Positive outcomes for buyers and sellers often occur when both parties readily share resources, resulting in a trusting and communicative relationship. As boundary spanners, salespersons play an important role in facilitating the use of customer resources together with the resources of their own firm which leads to value creation. Extant research focuses on how salespersons use these internal resources to create customer value, but has not explored the processes involved in also using the customer's resources. This research investigates the salespersons relationship building processes activities and interactions in conjunction with the accessing of customer resources. The study has its focus on the salesperson bonds, resource ties, and activity links based on the IMP interaction model. In this research, in-depth interviews of managers with sales responsibility explore the nature of customer resources and identify six sales persons’ activities important in accessing these resources.

Recently, supplier satisfaction has gained more attention both in practice and in academic research. However, the knowledge accumulation process is still in an embryonic and explorative phase. Likewise, supplier satisfaction measuring in practice may still benefit from an impetus from academia to be more widely used. This paper aims at considerably expanding understanding of supplier satisfaction by proposing to apply a social capital and a resource dependence theory perspective. We expect an abundance of social capital in a relationship to relate positively to supplier satisfaction, whilst power disequilibrium and dependence from the buyer are expected to negatively relate to supplier satisfaction. It is worth highlighting that, according to research rooted in Hofstede's cultural dimensions model, the perception and acceptance of power differences resulting from a situation of dependency is highly culture specific. We therefore further hypothesise that supplier satisfaction will be moderated by cultural differences and ask researchers to take the cultural dimension into account.

New product development occurs nowadays mostly in joint buyer–supplier projects, which require closer ties between the partners in order to mobilize their resources. One issue arising from this collaborative model is that the buyer tends to become more dependent on the supplier. Multiple cases of supplier obstructionism have been reported. To mitigate this dilemma, this paper analyzes the relevance of customer attractiveness as an enabler of collaboration. Testing this hypothesis on a sample of 218 buyer–supplier relationships, we show that dependency as such is not the issue in the presence of close ties. Buyers who are a preferred customer of their suppliers can accept the risk of becoming dependent on them. The managerial implications of this finding is that firms should apply a reverse marketing approach and thus attempt to become the preferred customers of their important suppliers. From a conceptual perspective, our findings indicate the need to consider dependency not as an isolated variable, but in conjunction with attractiveness.

The diffusion of a relational view of markets has been accompanied by the introduction of the concept of relationship orientation, defined as the propensity to engage in a relational behaviour. But companies often struggle to obtain the benefits of close collaboration in business-to-business relationships, with important effects the way resources are combined in buyer–seller interactions. This paper will discuss three main elements that can limit the ability of a company to establish and maintain effective business relationships and therefore impede resource mobilization: opportunism, uncertainty and negative misalignment. The paper will highlight that for a relational orientation to influence resource mobilization positively, there is the need not only to build long-term relationships characterized by trust, commitment and information exchange, as often stressed in the literature, but also to manage relational opportunism, ambiguity and uncertainty.

We report the results of an analysis of the research impact of marketing academics using citation metrics for 2263 academics in the top 500 research universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities based in Australia and New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and the USA. The metrics are computed for publications from 2001 to 2013, which were collected in 2014 and 2015. We also report the same metrics for all universities in Australia and New Zealand that employ more than 4 marketing academics. The results provide an objective measure of research impact and provide benchmarks that can be used by governments, universities and individual academics to compare research impact. In an appendix we rank the top 100 university marketing departments in the top 500.

This commentary discusses how citations, when adopted as benchmarks, influence publication and assessment behaviours of researchers and institutions. It compares benchmarking based on Google Scholar with current research assessment practices, as exemplified by the ERA assessment in Australia. It then discusses the role of journals in the codifying and dissemination of knowledge and how the adoption of citation based assessment changes the status of citations and changes citation behaviours. It is concluded that journals will continue to be important as an intermediary in knowledge creation.