Amjad Hadjikhania, ,
Peter LaPlacab, , a Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden b University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019850113000618 Abstract
Despite the practice of B2B marketing dating back several thousand years, B2B marketing studies did not exist in significant numbers prior to the last three decades and we are now in the a stage of accelerated theory development. Contributions to B2B theory began at the end of the 1800s and in the early 1900s, but developments in the last decades have inspired this paper to study how the B2B marketing theory has evolved. The transition from an economic foundation to one built on the behavioral sciences and the recent wider applicability of B2B marketing theory towards other marketing fields is viewed in this paper as an exciting journey and is the focus of this paper. A historic development of the contributions reveals new knowledge on B2B research development and its applicability which is beneficial not only for researchers in B2B marketing research and industrial firms, but also other marketing fields.
Keywords
B2B marketing;
Historic development;
Exchange and economic theory;
Behavioral theory applications
1. Introduction
Commerce between organizations has been around since organizations were first developed. And of course this means that B2B marketing has also existed for millennia. While the study of Business to Business (B2B) marketing can be traced back to the 1890s, significant contributions to (B2B) marketing theory have only been made during the last three decades. Research of B2B marketing was silent over a long period of time, and our understanding of it was based on implicit, individualized, and experiential based on the behavior of businessmen (Hadjikhani & LaPlaca, 2012); it existed in society but had little scientific identity or inquiry. It took several centuries before business
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