Guest Editors

Ruiz-Alba, José L. University of Westminster, London (UK)
Rodríguez-Molina, Miguel A. University of Granada (Spain)
Soares, Anabela. University of West England Bristol (UK)

Submission deadline: December 31, 2021

Purpose of the Issue

This Call for Papers invites submissions for a Special Issue of the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing on “Challenges and opportunities for increasingly turbulent times in business markets”.

Interesting trends were emerging in business-to-business services marketing strategies (de Jong et al. 2021), but the Covid-19 pandemic is transforming the way firms operate with disastrous effects for most B2B firms around the world although with interesting opportunities (Cortez & Johnston, 2020). The way companies provide services or even consider their offerings has been revolutionised. Customer trends have adjusted to new realities (Rosenbaum and Russell-Bennett, 2020) requiring tremendous changes which in many cases seem to be here to stay.

This fascinating context and a combination of unprecedented circumstances suggest relevant research questions such as:

What are the main challenges that business markets are facing due to Covid-19?

What opportunities will emerge for B2B marketing in future post-Covid scenarios?

What are the main challenges of B2B sales professionals? (Luu, 2021)

What are the main implications for customer experience? (Becker & Jaakkola, 2020)

How can interfunctional coordination (Ruiz-Alba et al., 2019) and resource integration (Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2012) be strategically designed and successfully implemented?

How can digitalization create superior value for customers and redefine new business models?  What is the new role of digital transformation in sales? (Wengler et al, 2021).

We invite theoretical and empirical papers, and both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are admissible. Attention to practitioner issues and implications are important, as the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing enjoys readership from both practitioner and academic audiences.

This Special Issue welcomes high quality submissions seeking to address some of these research questions but is not limited to them.

Indicative themes for the Special Issue (though these are not restrictive) are, for example:

• Trust
• Power
• Talent management
• Marketing Capabilities
• Communication
• Business Ethics
• Sustainability
• Marketing strategy
• Servitization
• Business models
• Absorptive capacity
• Collaboration and co-opetition
• Marketing Innovation
• Family firms
• Customer engagement
• Gamification

 

• Customer orientation
• Franchise
• Key account management
• Supply chain management
• Sales management
• Social Media Marketing
• Buyer behaviour
• Industry 4.0
• Internet of things
• Blockchain
• Big data
• Digitalization
• Augmented reality and virtual reality
• Artificial Intelligence; disruptive technologies
• Networks

 

Important Note

The Special Issue is open to submissions from any researcher and will also include some of the best papers presented at the CBIM 2021 International Conference (22–24 June 2021).

Submission

All papers should be submitted through the Journal’s submission online submission system https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jbim

Please select this issue from the drop down menu provided during submission.

Important Dates

Deadline for the submission of papers: December 31, 2021.
Submission Instructions
Articles should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length. This includes all text, for example, the structured abstract, references, all text in tables, and figures and appendices. Please allow 520 words for each figure or table.

Authors should follow JBIM Author Guidelines https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jbim?_ga=2.91743258.184210462.1620499657-134384732.1618239113#author-guidelines

For any queries, please, contact:

Dr. José L. Ruiz-Alba. 35 Marylebone Road. London NW1 5LS

Direct Lines: +44 (0) 203 5066 764. Email: j.ruizalbarobledo@westminster.ac.uk

 

References

Becker, L., & Jaakkola, E. (2020). Customer experience: fundamental premises and implications for research. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(4), 630-648.

Cortez, R. M., & Johnston, W. J. (2020). The Coronavirus crisis in B2B settings: Crisis uniqueness and managerial implications based on social exchange theory. Industrial Marketing Management, 88, 125-135.

de Jong, A., De Ruyter, K., Keeling, D. I., Polyakova, A., & Ringberg, T. (2021). Key trends in business-to-business services marketing strategies: Developing a practice-based research agenda. Industrial Marketing Management, 93, 1-9.

Kleinaltenkamp, M., Brodie, R.J., Frow, P., Hughes, T., Peters, L.D. and Woratschek, H. (2012), “Resource integration”, Marketing Theory, Vol. 12No. 2, pp. 201-205.

Luu, T. T. (2021). Activating salesperson resilience during the COVID-19 crisis: The roles of employer event communication and customer demandingness. Industrial Marketing Management, 96, 18-34.

Ruiz-Alba, J., Guesalaga, R., Ayestarán, R. and Morales Mediano, J. (2019). Interfunctional coordination: the role of digitalization. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-03-2019-0129

Rosenbaum, M.S. and Russell-Bennett, R. (2020), “Editorial: service research in the new (post-COVID) marketplace”, Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. I-V.

Wengler, S., Hildmann, G. and Vossebein, U. (2021), “Digital transformation in sales as an evolving process, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-03-2020-0124

The authoritative version of this call can be found here.