Business-to-Business Marketing

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 Ever-changing global and regional value chains, as well as dynamics due to digitalization or crises, constantly lead to new challenges and opportunities for business firms. New business models, digital solutions, and practices need to be developed as more classical concepts in academia are challenged. This is where this group contributes to the contemporary research of Business-to-Business Marketing issues. We are working on research questions of high relevance in academia, industry, and society.

Beyond critical reflection on current industrial business practices, our task is also the creation of solutions for current business problems, which have an impact on economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Understanding business actors as industrial firms and/or organizations from other domains, this group aims to support value creation and value appropriation in the B-to-B context. This includes basic research that enables practitioners to deduce new tools for managing business issues, such as the customer journey or the implementation of sustainability into business strategies. Currently, the focus is particularly on the impact of digitalization, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence on the B-to-B context.

To find problems and solutions of relevance, the research group strongly interacts across the academic, industrial, and societal domains. The spirit of this group is to contribute to the relevant research communities as well as to society.

Some of the key industries of relevance for this group are mechatronics, robotics, and the digital platform economy. Beyond these industrial high-tech domains, other interwoven domains like healthcare, tourism, supply industry, municipal firms, or consultancy firms are of interest as well.

This group has a particular focus on regional industries and has, during the last decades, shaped strong ties with large regional firms as well as with micro, small, or midsized firms and further lateral actors like municipalities or other public actors in the region of Southern Denmark. The research network, of course, includes various other research organizations in the Scandinavian countries, Germany, or other EU countries.

Various research paradigms are presented in this group. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are approached. There is a strong tradition in qualitative research that is based on several relational approaches (IMP-approach and other evolutionary approaches). Interactive perspectives that start their analysis on the dyadic level are often taken to identify the drivers and hindrances of B-to-B activities.

Research Projects

Examples for ongoing research projects in this group are as follows:

• Supporting business development for small and micro firms
• Understanding and supporting the start-up process in B-to-B
• Value creation and capture (in regional/global contexts)
• Understanding change and transformation in various business markets from an interactive approach (tourism, public companies, municipalities, health care sector/industry, etc.)
• Dataflow and data processing across firm boundaries
• Institutions that can frame business activities in the B-to-B context
• B-to-B segmentation and portfolio planning
• Understanding and managing transformation due to digitalization
• Initiating and managing transformation due to changing dynamics on a global scale
• Initiating and adapting business models to new technologies (for example: generative AI)
• New approaches to selling and merchandising
• Impact of digitalization and AI on the customer journey
• Connecting digital twins usage to customer success in B2B settings
• Impact of B2B CEO and CMO social media usage on firm performance 
• Exploring DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) elements in B2B sales professionals' research
• Improving resilience through crisis and change management in B-to-B firms

Journals and Conferences

This group focuses on high-quality output in academia in the form of publications and knowledge dissemination into the real world, but also through other activities that build strong societal and academic citizenship. This group is present in the Business-to-Business Marketing research community as follows:

• Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) research group with its annual conferences
• Conference on Business and Industrial Marketing
• EMAC European Marketing Association
• International Research Symposium on Networks in Changing Business Ecosystems

Head of Research Group

Associate Professor  Susanne Gretzinger

Group members