Brand worlds are powerful tools for branding and for creating extraordinary customer experiences in B2C markets, and they are increasingly applied in B2B contexts as well. However, the specific characteristics of industrial marketing raise the question of whether brand worlds function similarly in this setting. This study examines how visiting a brand world is related to brand experience and brand equity in industrial marketing. Drawing on data from 218 business visitors, we employed a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design combined with structural equation modeling. The findings reveal that brand world visits are associated with higher levels of brand experience and brand equity through the multidimensional concept of brand world experience, a higher-order formative construct. Brand world experience mediates the link between pre- and post-visit brand experience, but is not associated with pre-visit brand equity. Post-visit brand equity is related both directly to the brand world experience and indirectly to post-visit brand experience. These findings demonstrate that, when embedded in experiential marketing strategies, brand worlds function as instruments for enhancing brand experience and brand equity in industrial marketing, thereby underscoring their role as the metaphorical “living room of the brand.”
Shifts in buyer-seller interaction in B2B environments challenge how value co-creation unfolds, as exchanges become more fragmented, distributed, and digitally mediated. Immersive technologies (IMTs), including augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, offer new ways to structure such interactions, yet their role in B2B value co-creation has received limited attention and remains poorly understood. To address this gap, this study conducts an integrative literature review across six adjacent research disciplines in which IMTs are more established and that align with the core properties of B2B value co-creation. By synthesizing these insights, we develop an interaction-centered conceptualization of IMT-driven B2B value co-creation. We identify three immersive interaction capabilities: immersive experience generation, immersive operations & information optimization, and immersive connectivity & empowerment. These capabilities arise from configurations of immersive resources and immersive practices and reinforce the value co-creation practices of institutionalizing, linking, and materializing by reconfiguring the core elements of buyer-seller interaction. Our study advances B2B research by explaining how IMTs shape interaction dynamics and offers guidance for systematically structuring and enhancing value co-creation.
The oil and gas (O&G) sector, a key sunset industry, faces rising decarbonisation pressures from regulation, markets, and scrutiny. However, unilateral corporate attempts to address these pressures often struggle to secure social acceptance, creating legitimacy deficits that threaten the industry's social license to operate. Grounded in Legitimacy, Institutional, and Stakeholder theories, this study examines the micro-foundations of these deficits using a qualitative big-data approach, drawing on data from Reddit and YouTube between 2020 and 2024. Our thematic analysis revealed five legitimacy deficits that serve as antecedents for specific cross-sector partnerships: 1) Knowledge and Deception; 2) Greenwashing and Carbon Credit Cynicism; 3) Industry Transition Realities and Investments; 4) Technical Solutions and Alternative Approaches; and 5) Consumer Responsibility and Societal Change. These trust deficits help explain why firm-led claims may lose credibility and why firms in sunset industries may seek externally validated cross-sector partnerships as one route to rebuilding credibility. Through integrated theoretical perspectives, the study contributes conceptual insights into how specific legitimacy deficits can increase the salience of verification, governance, technical, and normative partnerships. It also identifies Cross-Sector Language and Framing as a moderating variable, showing how clear, shared communication protocols may shape whether partnerships are perceived as credible routes to legitimacy restoration.
Scripted short-form series contribute to a growing aspect of the creative and cultural industries in Canada. As digitalization has changed the industry, a business-to-business market has developed between creators and buyers. Creators consistently behave as marketers as they must create their product, secure a distribution platform, negotiate a price, and promote their series. Given this, creators must work with many actors to successfully bring a series to the market. Informal controls reflect the unwritten rules for success and cooperation, which are currently unknown in the creative and cultural industries, and rarely explored in marketing. Grounded in resource dependence theory, this study examines how informal controls shape creators' access to resources and marketing decisions in the Canadian short-form series market. The analysis draws on 48 in-depth interviews with Canadian creative producers. Findings show that informal controls are manifested through social networks, industry norms, cultural expectations, and shared beliefs. These informal controls have unequal and various effects on the marketing mix. This study contributes to creative-and-cultural industries and business-to-business literature by explicating the often-privileged quiet rules of conduct, and specifying the rewards and punishments on the marketing mix.
Companies have recognized that a profit-oriented approach is not sustainable from an operational, strategic, or reputational perspective. Consequently, creation of shared value (CSV) has emerged as an alternative approach that entails aligning profitability with social progress within the business strategy. However, this purpose is frequently constrained by limited resources and managers' lack of knowledge. In response, value co-creation (VCC)—as a collaborative value creation process—has gained relevance for strengthening CSV aims within B2B stakeholder relationships. Drawing on qualitative research grounded in multiple case studies, we conducted 12 interviews with agricultural company managers to examine their perceptions of CSV and VCC. Through content analysis, we investigated how CSV and VCC interact in B2B inter-firm settings, shedding light on the mechanisms that shape their development and execution, the underlying relationship configurations, failure and success drivers, and the contextual boundaries influencing these processes. Our findings underscore the relevance of CSV-VCC mutual interaction in continuous value creation cycles. We also identified several emerging relationship types and observed contingencies regarding firm size, number of stakeholders, inter-firm formalisation, and tensions between profit and social progress. Accordingly, this study offers a novel perspective bridging CSV and VCC and provides actionable insights for scholars, policymakers, and business leaders.
Value-based selling (VBS) is becoming a critical practice for business-to-business (B2B) companies due to its influence on increasing profitability. However, the literature is silent about the customer perspective on the VBS adoption process. While B2B research advocates for firms focusing on the actual value offered by suppliers, the understanding of specific antecedents that foster a customer's receptiveness to VBS is limited. We argue that the absence of the customer view on moving VBS adoption forward is a critical gap. Receptiveness to VBS − as a new construct − followed both qualitative and quantitative validation. Based on an empirical study of 207 purchasing managers, our results indicate that a customer's long-term orientation in ongoing relationships increases their propensity to support VBS strategies, and that this orientation requires the cultivation of different antecedents such as communication, cultural similarity, goal congruence and supplier reputation. Furthermore, trust and customer satisfaction work as boundary conditions for the long-term orientation effect on receptiveness to VBS. Overall, our study contributes to the VBS literature by identifying specific relational elements necessary for VBS to succeed from the customer perspective.
Sustainable selling in business-to-business (B2B) markets increasingly depends on suppliers' ability to convey the value of emission-reducing offerings, yet research on how to foster buyers' value perceptions of such offerings remains limited. Using a survey of 304 B2B buyers and a scenario-based experiment with 381 buyers, this research examines how suppliers foster buyers' value perceptions from a signaling perspective. In Study 1, the results show that salesperson sustainability expertise and Scope 3 emission disclosure enhance buyers' perceived financial and non-financial sustainability value, which in turn drive customer satisfaction and willingness to pay a premium. These effects are contingent on environmental regulation and buyer sustainability expertise. In Study 2, the results demonstrate that the signaling effectiveness of emission disclosure depends on the fit between value framing and emission contexts: opportunity framing is more effective for Scope 1 emissions, whereas risk framing is more effective for Scope 3 emissions. The findings advance understanding of sustainability value-based selling and provide guidance for suppliers on how to communicate sustainability value effectively.
Circular economy (CE) is getting increased attention from industrial actors as a response to sustainability concerns. In the industrial business network, CE enables firms to transition from linear to circular business models (CBM), requiring structural change and interactions that unfold during the process. The nature and role of these interactions during and for the transition to CBM is underexplored. Using a process-oriented case study approach, we examine a single in-depth case of a firm shifting its business from linear to circular, showing how interactions can trigger, support or hinder the transition, developing throughout this process at different firm, buyer-supplier relationship and network levels. This study advances CBM research by combining the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) conceptualizations with multi-level perspective (MLP) on sustainability transitions, situating micro-level interaction processes within the meso and macro context of CE transitions. The study shows that existing interactions generate the triggers that initiate circular transitions, and as the transition unfolds, new interactions emerge and cascade across firm, dyadic, and network levels. A multi-level framework explains how the nature of interactions develops from latent interactions to triggers and then cascade to shape the transition. For managers, circular transitions require ongoing, iterative engagement and trust-building with internal teams, suppliers, and customers, to create the underlying environment for circular practices.
Trust is a crucial antecedent for success in B2B relationships. Although research exists on how trust is developed in offline B2B contexts, limited research investigates how trust develops in predominantly online B2B environments, particularly on social media (SM). This study aims to conceptually unpack the mechanisms through which interorganizational trust develops between B2B suppliers and customers on SM, with particular focus on how trust is initiated and enhanced. The study employs a qualitative multiple-case study design involving seven B2B firms operating in China, drawing on 31 semi-structured interviews, netnography, and documentary data. We conceptualize five mechanisms for trust development: ‘trusted content’, ‘partner endorsements’, ‘acquaintance-based guanxi’, ‘high customer stickiness’, and ‘interpersonal salespeople-customer trust’. Building on these findings, we develop a framework that explicates trust initiation and enhancement as distinct but interrelated mechanisms, and show how interpersonal trust-building interactions underpin the development of interorganizational trust. The framework highlights platform trust as a mechanism, whereby trust developed through individuals' personal use of culturally embedded platforms transfers to and enhances B2B relationships. The findings challenge the prevailing assumption that B2B relationships must transition to offline interactions to establish trust and demonstrate that trust can be initiated and enhanced within online environments.
In capital-intensive and uncertain sectors like clean energy, governments are often viewed as initial market drivers, providing the necessary support for new technologies and infrastructure to stimulate change. Little is known about how firms and other stakeholders influence the market driver's role and activities in early-market formation. Drawing on a market shaping perspective, this study explores how actor visioning draws on competing frames to influence market shaping at the ‘fuzzy front-end’. We present a case study of the Australian clean hydrogen context, based on interviews with thirty-eight stakeholders and eighty-three policy and industry documents. We identify four key visioning contest areas which influence market shaping: developmental pace, resource allocation, market scope and governing purpose, each aligned with different sets of competing frames drawn upon by participants. Our findings make three contributions by conceptualising visioning as a distributed multi-actor process in market shaping; identifying how visioning leverages distinct, yet overlapping competing frames; and uncovering the discursive micro-foundations of market shaping to legitimise and promote preferred market configurations.
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into business-to-business (B2B) sales processes reshapes sales tasks and the governance of sales work. While existing sales research provides a thorough understanding of task-level outcomes and the performance benefits of AI in sales, less is known about the broader organizational dynamics of AI-enabled transformations in sales processes. Drawing on socio-technical systems (STS) theory, this study presents a process-oriented understanding of AI-enabled transformations in sales by examining how AI reshapes sales task execution and managerial governance within B2B sales processes.Based on 31 expert interviews with B2B sales practitioners and sales academics, we identify six interrelated socio-technical tensions that unfold across the pre-sales, sales, and post-sales phases of the sales process. Moving beyond a descriptive categorization of tensions, we theorize six socio-technical mechanisms: data institutionalization, recursive sensemaking, standardization of customer interactions, sensemaking asymmetries, role reclassification, and legitimation of expertise that explain how these tensions emerge and reshape sales tasks and governance.
Information asymmetry in buyer-supplier relationships has been linked to several influencing factors. However, these factors are often examined in isolation, limiting understanding of their synergistic effects. Grounded in agency theory, signaling theory, and transaction cost economics, this study adopts a configurational perspective to examine which combinations of factors lead to high information asymmetry. Using a three-part study design, we first conduct a systematic literature review to identify relevant factors, which are then refined and prioritized through a Delphi study. Building on this foundation, fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) is applied to survey data from 385 buyer managers to uncover equifinal configurations leading to high information asymmetry in buyer-supplier relationships. The findings reveal several causal pathways involving trust, uncertainty, evaluation, information sharing, contractual governance, and dependency. To complement the configurational analysis, Random Forest is employed to assess the relative importance of these factors in predicting information asymmetry. By integrating fsQCA with Random Forest, the study combines configurational explanation with predictive analytics, demonstrating both how factor combinations produce information asymmetry and which factors matter most. The study advances the industrial marketing literature on information asymmetry and offers directions for future research and practical guidance for managers to recognize conditions that lead to it.
As industrial business-to-business firms increasingly pursue digital servitization to generate recurring revenues, making digital services commercially viable remains difficult, especially when value capture depends on customer access, data permissions, and intermediary-governed contractual arrangements. Although prior research has emphasized value creation and capability development in digital servitization, we know little about how industrial firms make digital-service pricing commercially viable. In this paper, we undertake a longitudinal exploratory qualitative case study of a leading European OEM operating in a mission-critical context. Our findings make three contributions. First, we develop a pricing-conditions perspective by showing that digital-service pricing depends on data access and interpretability, measurability and attribution, governance positioning, and service architecture and repeatability. Second, we identify four digital-service commercialization patterns of SLA-enhancing, incident-based, predictive, and planning-oriented, and enabling and infrastructural services that explain why digital services differ in how they can be packaged and defended commercially. Third, we develop four pricing configurations, i.e., ad hoc, customized, standardized, and value-based pricing, showing that pricing viability depends less on selecting a pricing approach than on aligning the service's commercial role, customer-value locus, feasibility conditions, and commercial and governance arrangements. In this sense, pricing in digital servitization is better understood as a configurational approach than an isolated price-setting decision and strategy. By doing so, the study extends research on digital servitization and industrial pricing, offering a configurational understanding of how, and under what conditions, digital-service pricing becomes commercially viable.
While the crowdsourcing of marketing activities offers firms access to external knowledge, its potential to enhance dynamic capabilities (sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring) lacks empirical investigation. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory and using an exploratory qualitative approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with key informants, including marketing managers and crowdsourcing platform managers. Our findings reveal a persistent discrepancy between the potential value of crowdsourced insights and their actual integration into dynamic capabilities, conceptualized as the value appropriation gap. This gap arises from systemic friction when firms attempt to assimilate heterogeneous, externally generated insights with internal, firm-specific knowledge. We identify two interconnected barriers fueling this gap: cognitive biases, which distort the assimilation of external input, and ordinary capabilities, which can become structural barriers inhibiting innovation. By formalizing the value appropriation gap, we introduce a crowd-contextualized mechanism explaining why firms often fail to fully leverage external knowledge for competitive advantage.
Sustainability creates tensions for small entrepreneurial firms yet understanding of how these firms navigate such tensions within business networks remains limited. Drawing from an Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) perspective, this paper explores how small entrepreneurial firms experience and navigate sustainability tensions. Using in-depth interviews with 32 craft food and drink enterprises across Ireland and Scotland, we develop a conceptual framework revealing how sustainability and network paradoxes become knotted in resource-constrained entrepreneurial contexts. Our findings identify four novel relational sustainability tensions: Values vs. Commerciality, Legitimacy vs. Authenticity, Competition vs. Collaboration, and Fidelity to Craft vs. Scaled Production. Rather than viewing these tensions solely as constraints, we demonstrate that they can be actively leveraged, functioning simultaneously as catalysts for innovation, collaboration, and competitive advantage. Three network-level mechanisms enable this leveraging: circular innovation emerging from environmental constraints, sustainability certification as strategic asset, and collaborative sustainability networks. We extend paradox theory by revealing leverage as a third response beyond resolution and acceptance, advance IMP scholarship by demonstrating how sustainability tensions catalyse novel network configurations, and contribute to sustainability entrepreneurship by showing how resource constraints become sources of competitive advantage. Implications for entrepreneurial practice and policy are discussed. We propose a research agenda for examining how leveraging capabilities develop over time and across contexts.
Although innovation orientation (IO) and customer orientation (CO) may drive the adoption of green business strategies (GBS) in SMEs, previous research has mainly examined their influences separately. This study investigates their relative influence on GBS implementation, while also considering the moderating effect of environmental regulations (ER). Survey data from 140 Chilean B2B SMEs reveal that IO and CO have similarly strong, positive effects on GBS implementation. Regarding the moderating role of ER, stringent ER weaken the IO-GBS link, while they do not act as a moderator of the CO-GBS relationship. According to post-hoc qualitative evidence, this reflects the deeply intertwined nature of customer- and compliance-driven sustainability demands in the B2B SME context. The findings suggest that B2B SMEs can benefit from cultivating both strategic orientations (i.e., IO and CO) as independent organizational capital resources, while highlighting how regulatory stringency constrains innovation-driven sustainability and conditions the effectiveness of CO as a driver of GBS in resource-constrained emerging market contexts.
Purpose: Client-agency ethics in digital marketing are increasingly shaped by platform governance. While prior research emphasises internal and relational ethical tensions, such as dyadic information asymmetry and bilateral opportunism, this study examines how platform governance and algorithmic opacity reconfigure the evidentiary and evaluative conditions of client-agency ethical judgement. Methodology: The study draws on 21 semi-structured interviews with 14 senior agency practitioners and 7 smallto-medium-sized clients in the UK (conducted between 2025 and 2026), analysed abductively using thematic analysis. Findings: Three interlinked dynamics are identified: platform-governed information asymmetry, where platforms restrict access to causal data and algorithm update information; attribution-accountability indeterminacy, where performance outcomes cannot be credibly attributed to agency activity or platform change; and an answerabilityadaptability impasse, where agencies must justify and adapt strategy under significant evidentiary constraint, provoking client scepticism and strategic paralysis. Contributions: The study advances client-agency and platform governance research in three ways. First, it reconceptualises the client-agency relationship as a platform-governed triad, positioning platforms as constitutive non-human actors. Second, it reframes key information asymmetries as structurally produced rather than relationally resolvable. Third, it identifies a boundary condition for relational governance, demonstrating how platform governance and algorithmic opacity undermine the visibility and evaluability required for these mechanisms to function. The analysis also outlines implications for agency value and regulatory safeguards in platform-governed client-agency relationships.
The circular economy is generally regarded as a means to tackle the climate crisis, though the social mechanisms required to ensure a just green transition remain unclear. Social enterprises are key actors in this effort, blending environmental and social goals and providing circular services whilst also creating jobs and integrating vulnerable segments of the population into the workforce. This study adopts the service-dominant logic as a theoretical framework to understand the nested, overlapped, and emergent nature of the service ecosystems in which social enterprises operate in this transition to a circular economy. Through qualitative case study research in the textile and electrical waste streams, we identify social enterprises as generic actors with embedded reflexivity and we expand the concept to 'ecosystem reflexivity' as a fundamental prerequisite for intentional systems shaping with two dimensions: cross-ecosystem reflexivity, enabling institutional learning across service ecosystems, and nested-ecosystem reflexivity, facilitating actors to reconcile conflicting institutional logics and paradoxes. This research enriches industrial marketing literature by empirically unveiling the institutional dynamics at play in the transition towards a just circular economy whilst also offering policy and strategic insights for preserving ecosystem viability.
While sales control systems are intended to improve performance, under role stress they may also inadvertently increase the likelihood of unethical behavior. Despite growing evidence that stress is positively related to unethical behaviors, this perspective has not yet widely permeated sales management control research. The present study conceptualizes stress, induced by role stressors such as ambiguity and conflict, as positively related to unethical behaviors, and examines whether sales management controls moderate these relationships. Our study empirically tests the joint effects of role stressors and sales control systems on unethical sales behaviors, using multilevel models of data from both salespeople and their managers. The findings show that role ambiguity is positively related to unethical behaviors, and this effect is strengthened (weakened) by the presence of outcomebased (behavior-based) controls, while the effect of role conflict becomes non-significant when sales controls are added to the model. We discuss the findings and argue that future studies should simultaneously assess the effects of role stressors on both performance and unethical behaviors, to avoid the potential for unintended, harmful consequences.
Business model (BM) design has been found to be important in explaining firms' performance. We applied the theoretical lens of contingency theory and the strategic fit approach to examine the optimal alignment between BM design and firm performance under the influence of internal and environmental contingency factors. We used empirical data from 309 Finnish firms collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings showed that alignment between efficiency-centered BM, marketing, technological, and networking capabilities, and technological and institutional turbulence had positive performance implications. In contrast, the fit between novelty-centered BM and contingency factors is not associated with superior performance, suggesting that the performance implications of this BM design depend on the performance dimension considered. Furthermore, our results indicated that not all types of capabilities supported novelty-centered BM design, which contributes to a better understanding of its antecedents. These findings have important implications for BM research by offering novel insights into the drivers and performance implications of efficiency-and novelty-centered BM designs under conditions of global turbulence. Additionally, our study illustrates the explanatory power of the strategic fit approach in BM research, although it has previously been largely applied to the examination of other marketing aspects.
