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Call for Papers
Industrial Marketing Management
Special Issue

”Managing through a crisis: Managerial implications for B2B firms”

Anthony Di Benedetto, Adam Lindgreen, Carsten Lund Pedersen, and Thomas Ritter

Besides the humanitarian crisis caused by the corona pandemic, many, if not all, business-to-business firms are struggling in this unprecedented global crisis, as illustrated in increased safety measures to protect employees, supply chain disruptions, maintaining daily operations, plummeting customer demand, lack of cash flow, regulatory uncertainty, and many other issues.

In the light of these fundamental challenges, Industrial Marketing Management wants to offer insights and tools to help executives navigate through this crisis. We therefore develop this special issue, which seeks contributions that help business-to-business firms to get through these challenging times. The particular requirements of this special issue are as follows:

• The manuscripts must be based on theories;
• The manuscripts must have clear managerial implications (how to do/what to do);
• The manuscripts must not make a theoretical contribution (the authors use theory to help executives—but it is not a theory development project);
• The manuscripts can be shorter than normal submissions (but not less than 8 double spaced pages, or no less than 2,000 words);

We are interested in a variety of topics that can help decision makers both navigate and recover from the present crisis. Examples of topics include, but are not limited to:

• Lockdown effects on business relationships
• The impact of corona on industrial business models
• B2B strategies for recovering a crisis
• Using industrial relationships to build resilience
• Disruptions of supply chains
• Building risk preparedness in B2B firms

The review process will be very fast to allow papers to be read by executives during the crisis, not years later. This means that the editors will only invite manuscripts for revisions when revisions are likely to be made satisfactory in one round. The special issue editors will serve as reviewers and there will be two reviewers for each paper.

In order to make the contributions widely available, we have asked Elsevier to give all successful manuscripts open access. In order to be fast, accepted papers will be published online immediately after acceptance (and proof-reading by authors). We expect to have a sufficient number of contributions fast, so that we will close for submissions by 1 May 2020.

Please consider what your research can offer to executives fighting the consequences of the corona crisis. If you have an idea, please contact Thomas Ritter (ritter@cbs.dk) for questions and comments. We hope that we can offer lots of advice to executives very fast. These difficult times demand extraordinary efforts from millions of people— and we are convinced that the business-to-business marketing community can and should do their part to help businesses to recover from the severe consequences of the corona pandemic.