CHAPTER 7
Business-to-business marketing:
organizational buying
behaviour, relationships and
networks
PETER W. TURNBULL and SHEENA LEEK
Introduction
In this chapter an attempt is made to trace the
development of research and practice in busi-
ness-to-business marketing. The term ‘business-
to-business marketing’ is increasingly replacing
the more traditional ‘industrial marketing’ and
‘organizational marketing’ descriptions, and
will be used in this chapter to describe those
marketing activities of any kind of organization,
public or private, which has exchange relation-
ships with other organizations.
The understanding of organizational buyer
behaviour can be seen as a process of develop-
ment over the past 40 years within the wider
context of industrial or business-to-business
marketing theory. Unfortunately, the study of
business-to-business marketing has ‘been a
poor relation within the broad family of
attempts to understand the markets and mar-
keting in general’ (Ford, 1990, p. 1). Most early
theory was based on a rather simplistic transfer
of consumer goods-based knowledge which
propounded ‘effective’ marketing largely as a
manipulation of the marketing mix. Unfortu-
nately, this approach largely ignored the real-
ities of business-to-business markets. However,
a number of researchers have recognized the
difference of organizational buyers and their
behaviour, and a number of paradigms have
emerged to better understand and explain the
complexity facing researchers and managers
working in this field. Perhaps the most impor-
tant of these more recent conceptualizations is
that relating to interaction, relationships and
networks, originally developed by the IMP
(International Marketing and Purchasing)
group – (Hakansson, 1982; Turnbull and Cun-
ningham, 1981), which has led to the current
interest in relationship marketing.
An understanding of the organizational
buying process is fundamental to the develop-
ment of appropriate business-to-business mar-
keting strategy. The organizational buyer is
influenced by a wide variety of factors, both