Business Marketing Comes of Age: A Comprehensive Review of the Literature David A Reid Richard E Plank Business Marketing Comes of Age:Comes of Age: Business Marketing A Comprehensive Review of the Literature A Comprehensive Review of the Literature David A Reid Richard E Plank INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY The study of business marketing as a distinct subject matter has had a surprisingly long history For example, the first casebook dealing with industrial marketing was Copeland (1930) and an early textbook strictly on industrial marketing was Frederick (1934) Academic research on the subject was relatively sparse until 1972 when Industrial Marketing Management was introduced as a peer-refereed journal specifically for industrial marketing Since that time academic research within the context of industrial and business marketing has continued to progress The last comprehensive review of the field was Webster (1978a) Hence, the focus of this review is on industrial/business marketing research that was published from 1978 through 1997 Despite Fern and Brown’s (1984) challenge, industrial marketing, or business marketing as it has come to be known, continues to grow as a specific subdiscipline within marketing Since 1978, almost 2,200 articles dealing with business marketing have been published in the selected refereed academic outlets included in this review Currently, there are close to a dozen business marketing textbooks in print, the most recent being Anderson and Narus (1999), compared to only two major U.S textbooks in 1978: Hill, Alexander, and Cross (1975) and Corey (1973) There have also been a number of books targeted to executives on various aspects of business marketing (e.g., The authors would like to thank the editor, J David Lichtenthal, and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and contributions to this paper during the review process Patti and Kennedy 1991; Messer 1992; Sherlock 1992; Skinner 1995; Yovovich 1995; Peck 1997; Bly 1998; Silverstein 1998) Given the tremendous growth in the business marketing literature since 1978, it seems only appropriate to ask • how much progress has been made in understanding the nature of business marketing, • what specific areas of business marketing have been studied the most, and • how much progress has been made with respect to theory devel- opment regarding the positive and normative dimensions of business marketing practices? This paper presents a comprehensive review of the academic literature on business marketing from 1978 through 1997 During this time period there have been a number of reviews that have addressed specific areas within business marketing; most of these have focused on organizational buying behavior Recently, a series of reviews have examined the contributions of Industrial Marketing Management (LaPlaca 1997), Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing (Johnston and Lewin 1997), Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (Lichtenthal, Wilson, and Long 1997), and Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing (Plank 1997) Each provided useful insights but was limited by its focus on only a single publication source Thus, there remained a need for a more integrative and comprehensive review Toward that end, we have developed a database and analyzed a total of 2,194 articles from twenty-three key marketing journals, five sets of academic proceedings, and twelve scholarly books Table provides a complete list of the sources used for this review and indicates the first year that a particular reference appeared in the database Basic information on each article entered into the database includes the topics addressed and whether the article was empirical or nonempirical For empirical articles, information was also collected on research design used, sampling results, type of respondents sampled, and statistical analysis techniques used While the intent in compiling the database for this review was to be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible, limits had to be set to keep what was already a daunting task from becoming an impossible one Thus, not all possible publication sources were included in the TABLE List of Reference Sources and Number of Entries and Year of First Publication Source Academy of Marketing Science Annual Proceedings American Marketing Association Summer Educators’ Conference American Marketing Association Winter Educators’ Conference Association for Consumer Research Annual Conference Business Horizons California Management Review European Journal of Marketing Harvard Business Review International Journal of Research in Marketing Industrial Marketing Management Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science Journal of Advertising Journal of Advertising Research Journal of Business Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing Journal of Business Research Journal of Consumer Research Journal of Marketing Journal of Marketing Research Journal of Product Innovation Management International Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management Management Science Marketing Science Society for Consumer Psychology Conference Sloan Management Review Misc Book Chapters and Articles Total n 58 80 % Year 2.6 3.6 1978 1978 19