Special issue of Industrial Marketing Management
Co-Management of Purchasing and Marketing

Industrial Marketing Management announces the call for papers for a special issue on co-management of purchasing and marketing. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2014.

Purpose of the special issue

Purchasing professionals recognize the value of aggressive transactional sourcing, as well as of cooperative relational sourcing. Marketing professionals, similarly, understand the role that transactional marketing, as well as more relational marketing practices play. The overall objective of this special issue is to provide a comprehensive collection of cutting-edge theories and research concerning how business practitioners co-manage purchasing and marketing.

Past literature has examined developments within purchasing and marketing. For example, the special issue of Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing 23(2) considered the known contemporary marketing practices research program. However, with purchasing and marketing developing from different origins and standpoints, both academically and practically, there is a dearth of thought leadership concerning the combination of the two business functions. There are some exceptions, though. We refer to, for example, the special issue of Industrial Marketing Management 38(8); articles in that issue called for a change in orientation from provision of goods to that of capabilities, and a consequent re-orientation of purchasing and marketing roles. Another example is the work of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group that takes an industrial networks approach to bring together purchasing with industrial marketing (e.g., Gadde, Håkansson, and Persson, 2010). However, there still is some way to go in crucially actioning theory and practice for cohesion and co-ordination. Relationship marketing, a supply-chain relationship, and an industrial networks approach (e.g., Christopher, 2005; Hingley, 2005) may form the basis of theory and practice, but opportunity for this proposed special edition lies in taking a more radical view to draw on wider reference points and applications.

Instruments to measure organizations’ use of purchasing practices and marketing practices exist. In purchasing, four practices are identified: transaction purchasing, electronic purchasing, interactive purchasing, and network purchasing (Lindgreen, Vanhamme, Van Raaij, and Johnston, 2013). In marketing, five practices are identified: transaction marketing, database marketing, e-marketing, interaction marketing, and network marketing (Coviello, Milley, and Marcolin, 2001). These frameworks help us to a better awareness of how organizations relate to their supply markets and industrial markets.

Both the purchasing framework and the marketing framework present business practitioners with robust and well-tested ways of evaluating what they are doing, using indicators based on the exchange and managerial aspects of purchasing practices and marketing practices, respectively. The measures used are general enough to have relevance across the range of the said practices, yet the positions also are specific enough to capture different practices of purchasing and marketing.

Importantly, the practices in either framework are not mutually exclusive. That is, the purchasing practices framework and the marketing practices framework enable an organization to score high, for example, on both transaction marketing and e-marketing and low on the remaining three marketing practices; or perhaps to score low on transaction purchasing and high on all three forms of relational purchasing practices (electronic purchasing, interactive purchasing, and network purchasing). In purchasing, for example, four mixes of practices have been identified and labeled as transactional, interpersonal dyadic, interpersonal network, and integrative relational configurations (Lindgreen, Vanhamme, Van Raaij, and Johnston, 2013).

To achieve the overall aim of bringing together leading thoughts and practices concerning co-management of marketing and purchasing, submitted papers will be embedded within the purchasing and marketing frameworks discussed above. We invite both (a) theoretical papers that examine fundamental issues in, or offer comprehensive frameworks of how organizations co-manage purchasing and marketing and (b) empirical papers—both qualitative and quantitative—that investigate more specific issues in how organizations co-manage purchasing and marketing. As Industrial Marketing Management is widely read by an academic and business audience, all submissions must include strong implications for business practitioners.

As part of the special issue we will invite commentaries from academics and, in particular, business practitioners. In addition, we will include interviews, where appropriate, with academics and business practitioners (i.e., commentaries) and authors (i.e., articles). These interviews will appear as digitally recorded videos (lasting five-ten minutes) and will appear as pop-ups at strategic places in the commentaries and articles through the web version of the commentaries and articles. Thus authors with an accepted paper for inclusion in this special issue must be ready to submit a five-ten minutes long interview in a digital format. The guest editors will forward further instructions once papers for inclusion in the special issue have been finalized. The intention of inviting commentaries from academics and business practitioners and the placing of interviews at the journal’s website is to increase awareness—and impact—of this special issue.

A final note: All authors submitting to this special issue must be ready to assist in the reviewing process. Each author will receive only one paper to review. As the production schedule is tight, the first stage of the reviewing process needs to be completed within two months. After that, authors will be given three months for revising their papers. The next stage of the reviewing process must be completed within a month, with the authors then having a month for revising their papers. Stage two of the reviewing process will be repeated, if necessary. Revised papers will be reviewed by the original reviewers only.

References

Christopher, M. (2005), Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Creating Value-Adding Networks, 3rd edition, Pearson Education, London.

Coviello, N., Milley, R., and Marcolin, B. (2001), “Understanding IT-enabled interactivity in contemporary marketing”, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 15(4), pp. 18-33.

Gadde, L.E., Håkansson, H., and Persson, G. (2010), Supply Network Strategies, 2nd edition, Wiley, Chichester.

Hingley, M. (2005), “Power to all our friends? Learning to live with imbalance in UK supplier-retailer relationships”, Industrial Marketing Management, 34, (8), pp. 848-858.

Industrial Marketing Management (2009), special issue on organizing and integrating marketing and purchasing in business markets, 38(8), pp. 847-1024.

Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing (2008), special issue on contemporary marketing practices, 23(2), pp. 84-141.

Lindgreen, A., Vanhamme, J., Raaij, E. van, and Johnston, W.J. (2013), “Go configure: the mix of purchasing practices to choose for your supply base”, California Management Review, 55(2), pp. 72-96.

Paper submission and review process

Papers submitted must not have been published, accepted for publication, or presently be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submissions should be no more than 6,000 words in length excluding references, figures, and tables. Copies should be submitted via email MS Word attachment (in one file including all figures and tables) to the guest editors, as well as the IMM office (plaplaca@journalimm.com; please indicate that the paper is for the special issue on co-management of purchasing and marketing). The first page must contain the title of the paper and the names and contact details of all authors. For additional guidelines on font size, line spacing, margins, headings, etc., see “Notes for Contributors” from a recent issue of Industrial Marketing Management, or visit the journal’s website. Papers not complying with all of the notes for contributors, poorly written, or without the first page with the required information will be desk rejected. Suitable papers will be subjected to a double-blind review; hence, authors must not identify themselves in the body of their paper. (Please do not submit a Word file with “track changes” active or a PDF file.) Once a decision has been made as to which papers will be included in the special issue, authors may be requested to reduce the length of their papers; this, however, will be decided later in the process.

Please address all questions to the guest editors:

Professor Adam Lindgreen
Cardiff Business School
E-mail: LindgreenA@cardiff.ac.uk

Professor Martin Hingley
Lincoln Business School
E-mail: mhingley@lincoln.ac.uk

 

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