Interorganizational Relationships in Marketing: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

• Author: Lara Agostini,Anna Nosella
• Date: 01 April 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12084
• Published date: 01 April 2017

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 19, 131–150 (2017)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12084

Interorganizational Relationships

in Marketing: A Critical Review

and Research Agenda

Lara Agostini and Anna Nosella

Department of Management and Engineering, University of Padua, Stradella San Nicola 3, 36100 Vicenza, Italy

Corresponding author email: agostini@gest.unipd.it

Over recent decades, the area of marketing interorganizational relationships (IORs)

has received increasing attention from both academics and practitioners, even if a

comprehensive portrayal of past research is still lacking. Hence, the aim of the present

paper is to review the literature on marketing IORs in order to develop a framework

meant to organize the different contributions in this area and suggest new paths for

future research. The analysis suggests that three main streams of research can be

identified with regard to the type of relationshipbetween variables investigated by each

article. Moreover, taking into account the purpose of the IOR, common patterns within

each stream may be identified. A critical analysis of articles grounded on both the

streams and the purpose of marketing IORs suggests there are still substantial gaps in

knowledge, which open new paths for future research regarding both methodological

issues and hot topics.

Introduction

Over recent decades, the field of interorganizational

relationships (IORs) has received increasing attention

from both academics and practitioners. The literature

on this topic is very broad, and some attempts to

synthetize it have been made by different researchers

(e.g. Kale and Singh 2009). As the number of articles

studying IORs grew,so did the number of literature re-

views published in academic journals (Christoffersen

2013). While the earliest theoretical articles and

reviews of IORs (e.g. Grandori and Soda 1995; Jarillo

1988; Thorelli 1986) provided a broad and compre-

hensive portrayal of previousworks, recently scholars

have restricted their lens to the analysis of specific

organizational and managerial features, such as

leadership (M¨

uller-Seitz 2012), learning (Beeby and

Booth 2000) and proximity (Knoben and Oerlemans

This research is part of the ‘Developing organizational am-

bidexterity to foster the competitiveness of the Italian ma-

chinery industry’ project (cod. CPDA129273), funded by

the University of Padua.

2006), which have become the objects of the reviews.

Also the purpose of IORs has caught the attention of

some researchers who have focused their review on

works that concern a specific typology of IORs: in

this respect, IORs focused on research and develop-

ment (R&D) (B¨

uy¨

uk¨

ozkan and Arsenyan 2012), and

logistics and transportation (Cruijssen et al. 2007)

have been addressed. In this context there are, to our

knowledge, no articles specifically dedicated to car-

rying out a comprehensive literature reviewof ar ticles

concerning marketing IORs. Therefore, the rationale

behind a literature review specifically focused on

marketing IORs rests on two main arguments. The

first is that this topic has been gaining pace rapidly,

and an increasing trend in the formation of marketing

IORs has been registered among many firms (Reid

et al. 2008), which has caught the attention of both

the academic world and public and private sectors.

A few well-known examples of this type of IORs

involving large firms are the IBM–Bull alliance in

the computer industry (Michelet and Remacle 1992),

the joint advertising campaign between McDonald’s

and Coca-Cola (Cooke and Ryan 2000) in the food

C2015 British Academy of Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Publishedby John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

132 L. Agostini and A. Nosella

industry, or the more recent ‘Samsung–Armani sym-

biosis’ (Ahn et al. 2010). Actually, the importance of

marketing IORs was underlined many years ago by

Varadarajan and Cunningham (1995), who identified

achieving market growth and/or increasing sales and

gaining access to new markets as two of the most

important reasons why firms enter an IOR. Further-

more, marketing IORs seem to play a significant role

not only for accessing new markets and reducing

costs, but also for favoring the internationalization

process of firms (Kale and Singh 2009; Ring and

Van de Ven 1994), supporting joint brand activities

and increasing reputation, thus resulting in demand

growth (Das et al. 1998). These marketing collabo-

rations acquire growing relevance in improving firm

competitiveness, giving firms the chance to compete

effectively in divergent and often larger markets

(Dennis 2000). However, the different contributions

in this field appear unsystematic, causing the lack of

an organized body of literature on marketing IORs.

Consequently, practitioners often face a situation in

which they must design IORs without much specific

support from the research community to guide their

decisions (Thorgren et al. 2009).

The second argument deals with the fact that IORs

may be very different from each other, and face dif-

ferent requirements, problems and constraints with

particular reference to the purpose for which they are

built up (Das et al. 1998). While many studies have

investigated the features of upstream value chain ac-

tivities, as anticipated, to the best of our knowledge,a

comprehensive literature review specifically devoted

to IORs in marketing has not been performed until

now. With respect to other types of IORs, marketing

IORs have some distinctive characteristics related to

the horizon of benefits, which tends to be shorter

than that of R&D IORs (Das et al. 1998), and to

the fact that they operate close to the final markets

and firms are often pushed to enter this typology of

IORs in order to stimulate demand for mature prod-

ucts (Hagedoorn 1993). In addition, on the one hand,

marketing IORs are revealed to be particularly useful

in medium low-techindustries, where the key compet-

itive advantage typically comes from understanding

the needs of customers through marketing activities

(Lee and Chang 2014); on the other hand, marketing

IORs imply direct contact with markets, and clients

and are usually set up and followed by entrepreneurs

or managers, so mutual learning is less relevant than

in technological IORs (Colombo 2003). All these as-

pects may influence the way in which this type of

IOR develops and is managed,as well as the different

success factors, which calls for a dedicated literature

review in order to understand past research and stim-

ulate future research in this area.

Considering this background, the aim of the present

paper is to review systematically the extant literature

on marketing IORs in order to organize the differ-

ent contributions in this field, provide a comprehen-

sive portrayal of past research in marketing IORs and

identify new areas for future research.

In the remainder of the paper, after detailing the

methodological approach to the search and analysis

of articles, we first illustrate the framework that we

developed, in terms of the different building blocks

that make it up and the relationship between the build-

ing blocks. Then, we discuss the results by highlight-

ing the gaps in the extant literature and suggesting a

research agenda with some lines of inquiry for orga-

nization and management scholars.

Methodological considerations

In order to carry out the literature review,we followed

a methodological approach based on Pittaway et al.

(2004), who explain that the literature reviewstrategy

has a number of stages designed to provide a system-

atic and transparent method meant to guide the liter-

ature review. First, we identified the keywords to be

used in the search of double-blind peer-reviewed ar-

ticles in journals from the scientific database ISI Web

of Knowledge Core Collection. Considering that the

Core Collection of ISI Web of Knowledge includes

papers from 1985 onwards, we also performed the

search in Scopus, which imposes no backwardlimit of

time, to search for older articles published up to1985

by applying the same criteria described immediately

after. The search strategy was designed starting from

the definition of marketing IORs as any form of IOR

created among for-profit organizations focused on

‘activities downstream in the value chain, such as

distribution, sales, and promotions’ (Lee and Chang

2014; Swaminathan and Moorman 2009). Because

authors often refer to IORs using a variety of terms1

in order to capture all possible forms of marketing

IORs, we combined the terms ‘interorganizational

1In this area of research, there is not a shared and straight-

forward terminology identifying different types of IORs; as

a consequence, different terms are used to make reference to

the same phenomenon (e.g. network or alliance) or the same

term is used with different meanings.

C2015 British Academy of Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.