BUSINESS MARKETERS

Business Marketers

Business Marketers

Introduction and background to research

The twentieth anniversary of a journal is certainly a time for reassessment and a time for charting out future directions. While industrial marketing as a field of study predates the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing (JBIM), the journal's establishment and its evolution have paralleled the expansion of the existing field of industrial marketing. As the economy, particularly in the USA, turned in the 1980s from a manufacturing-dominant economy to predominantly service based, JBIM's establishment and growth acted as a bridge. It not only linked the traditional field of industrial marketing with the newer field of business-to-business marketing, but also joined the assumed dichotomy of academic research with managerial practice. At its twentieth anniversary, the journal's aims and scope provide us with the motivation to assess our own profession as marketing academics. (Copeland, 1920, 45)

Industrial marketing as a field of study blossomed from the late 1940s until the late 1960s, aided in part by the industrial expansion of the post-World War Two US economy, and by the conceptualization of marketing as merely a conduit for the distribution of industrial surplus (or glut). This predominant focus within industrial marketing was challenged towards the late 1960s by two simultaneous forces. One, marketing took a somewhat expected behavioral turn with a new focus on the consumer as a subject and unit of analysis (in the context of transactions, exchanges, and relationships that were to be documented later) rather than the products that were being distributed. This historic turn within marketing came at the dawn of a similar change in perspective in cognate social sciences, such as sociology. (Copeland, 1920, 45)

One can recount George Homans' celebrated Presidential Address in 1964 before the American Sociological Association commenting on the dominant functionalist perspective with a call to studying human behavior. A few years later in 1969, a pivotal behavioral turn in marketing also came with the publication of The Theory of Buyer Behavior by John A. Howard and Jagdish N. Sheth, which probably single-handedly established the formal field of consumer behavior (CB) as an area of inquiry. The same year the publication of Distribution Channels - Behavioral Dimensions, by Louis W. Stern (1969), also ensured that even industrial marketing, as we knew it until then, would never be the same. (Copeland, 1924, 45)

Two, around same time, the professoriate in the schools of business and the related fields of psychology and sociology started emphasizing rigorous scientific methods (i.e. quantitative) in their research, probably as a reaction to the perceived lower status accorded to them by their colleagues in natural/mathematical sciences. While debates occurred on the issue of rigor versus relevance in the fields of psychology, social psychology, sociology, management, and marketing, it was apparent by the mid-1980s that scientific rigor (albeit narrowly defined) in academic research within marketing had become the driver of a bus that was not only headed towards uncharted territory but also further away from a bona fide need to be contributing to both basic research and ...