Vesting B2B research with relevance and rigor through appropriate research questions and methods

Gounaris, Spiros (2020) Vesting B2B research with relevance and rigor through appropriate research questions and methods. [Review] (https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-04-2020-509)

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Abstract

Research in the business to business context has contracted relative to other fields of Marketing, like for example the studying of the consumer behaviour. This is a worrying trend given the importance of the B2B context for any economy as B2B transactions represent the majority of the exchanges in an economy. Apparently a variety of reasons account for this and Scheer ('Three challenging trends for marketing strategy and B2B Doctoral Education') identifies three very relevant ones: The need to work closely with one or often many more companies to generate the data that are necessary to answer many (if not most) of the questions that are relevant to the context; the need to recruit researchers who have excellent analytical and computational skills, often at the expense of other softer skills or a solid background in marketing; and the need to reconsider and revise our views on the impact the studies on B2B have for the practicing managers. With regards to the latter, improving the overall quality and the rigour of the research efforts in the B2B context is also a major challenge. Ritter's contribution ('Engaging in engaged B2B scholarship: Relevance squared') provides an excellent roadmap to ensure that future research initiatives come with a solid potential to generate not only relevant but also rigorous studies while addressing fascinating questions.

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