Guest editorial

Connect, engage, transform!

This Special Issue “Connect, Engage, Transform!” is associated with the 2018 Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy (ANZMAC) conference held in Adelaide, Australia in December 2018. The conference theme of “Connect Engage and Transform”, which is also the theme for this special issue recognizes the need for business researchers to connect with external stakeholders such as businesses and policymakers. Researchers should engage with different stakeholders to make an impact. All papers presented at the ANZMAC conference and related to the general theme of business-to-business marketing were eligible to submit their manuscript for consideration to this special issue.

The ANZMAC B2B Special Interest Group (SIG) has approximately 60 members, covering a broad range of academics, from Australia, New Zealand and various countries in South-East Asia, Europe and the USA. The members are academics with an interest in B2B marketing in both the qualitative and quantitative domains and span a wide range of topics such as value creation, pricing, service solutions, interfirm governance, franchising and many other aspects of B2B marketing. The SIG organizes various initiatives to provide opportunities for research collaborations.

As joint leaders of the ANZMAC B2B SIG, we organized a special session at ANZMAC 2018 conference to discuss how to conduct impactful research in the area of B2B Marketing. The discussion at the conference recognized that while engagement with industry is costly in terms of time and effort, it can provide measurable benefits in terms of research impact in the B2B domain.

The first paper titled, “How can B2B researchers engage in impactful industry collaboration? Lessons from the field” written by Mooi, Mani, Kleinaltenkamp, Lilien and Wilkinson discusses this theme. Owing to pressures from government, accrediting bodies, research councils and more generally a need to provide effects on the thought processes and actions of academics, the impact of research has become even more important. In this paper, the authors provide a perspective on how to connect, engage and transform through a series of examples by which authors can conduct impactful research. Such an impact could be towards policymakers (e.g. Sudha Mani’s recommendations were extensively cited in the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and the Financial Services, Fairness in Franchising report).

The second paper titled, “Buyer-seller relational engagement and seller brand equity” by Dwivedi, Miles, Oczkowski, Weerawardena, Johnson and Wilkie studies how relational exchange, conceptualized as a higher-order construct comprising legal bonds, knowledge exchange impact buyer–perceived seller brand equity using a survey of 401 USA-based industrial buyers.

The third paper, “The Value of Values in Business Purchase Decisions” by Anwer, Deshpande, Derry and Basil uses evidence from Canada to study the role values play in business purchase decisions. Where most of the previous B2B literature argues for a rational decision-making process based on economic factors related to purchasing decisions, the authors partially reject this view by demonstrating an important role of personal values; humanity, bottomline and convention.

The fourth paper in this special issue, titled, “Gender Bias in the Recruitment of Entry-level B2B Salespeople” by Ashnai, Mani, Kothandaraman and Shekari examines how gender bias affects recruitment of students for entry-level sales positions. In this paper, the authors creatively use three years’ data from a sales competition in the USA to examine gender bias in recruitment. The authors find that managers, when engaging in short interactions to screen potential candidates, exhibit bias, but this bias is removed during long interactions that are used to evaluate a candidate’s performance.

The fifth paper in this issue is “Recipes for New Product Success: The Interplay between Orientations and Environmental Turbulence” by Ho and Plewa. The authors use the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis technique to assess the combination of strategic orientations, inter-functional coordination and environmental turbulence to improve new product success. Using the configurational approach and data from diverse industries, the authors find that no individual condition is necessary for new product success. Instead, success can be achieved by using a multiple configurational approach.

The sixth paper in this special issue is entitled, “Systematic Review of Determinants of Sales Performance: Verbeke et al.’s (2011) classification extended by Chawla, Lyngdoh, Guda and Purani. The authors provide an extensive review of the sales performance literature. The authors introduce new categories to the drivers of sales performance. This includes technological factors, job control, work-related social support, technological skills and strategic and non-strategic activities. These new categories of drivers account for about 50% of research published after Verbeke’s classification. The authors identify the scope of these drivers and this should enable a stream of research on sales performance.

The authors would like to sincerely thank Professor Wesley J. Johnston, JBIM Editor for granting them the opportunity to edit this special issue. The authors would also like to thank Prof Michael Kleinaltenkamp for his support and to the reviewers for providing constructive comments. Finally, the authors would also like to thank all the authors for their contributions to this special issue. The authors hope that the special issue will promote impactful research in the area of business-to-business marketing.