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CBIM 2011
Edited by Assistant Prof. Thomas Brashear-Alejandro, Dr Sergio Biggemann [University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA and University of Otago, School of Business, Dunedin, New Zealand]
1. Introduction
In the current business environment, the complexity of exchange between industries and markets is increasing, making companies ever more dependent on each other's resources and mutually linked via continuous interaction patterns and relational bonds. Increased complexity originates from the growing degree of specialization, knowledge intensity and service intensity, and technological complexity that within most industries is attributable to the trend to purchase non-core activities through external resources (e.g. [22] Möller, 2006; [16] Jacob and Ulaga, 2008; [26] Nordin and Kowalkowski, 2010).
As the business focus shifts away from exchanging tangibles towards exchanging intangible, innovative and knowledge intensive offerings, buyers and sellers are facing the challenge of how to evaluate/communicate the value potential of a variety of offerings ([1] Aarikka-Stenroos and Jaakkola, 2012). Increased complexity also makes buyers' search and management of information more demanding ([5] Brashear-Alejandro et al. , 2010). This development in business is reflected in the academic arena by the conceptualizations and models of industrial buying and organizational purchasing. There has been a leap within business-to-business marketing research from the focal firm oriented organizational buying behavior approach (OBB) to the currently dominant approaches that depict purchasing in terms of buyer-seller relationships embedded at various levels of the network. The latter approaches have no doubt contributed towards an holistic understanding of the buying phenomenon as part of a wider system, but are restricted when it comes to their capability to provide the means to understand the focal buyer's intentional behavior (see [20] Makkonen et al. , 2012). The classic OBB models are, on the other hand, incapable of capturing the modern challenges related to the complexity of buying that originates from the novelty of purchase, the criticality and importance of task, the uniqueness of the decision, information asymmetry between the buyer and seller on pursued value, extent of choice, and the intricacy of the object of exchange (e.g. intangible, specialized or customized solution, service or innovation) (see [5] Brashear-Alejandro et al. , 2010; [1] Aarikka-Stenroos and Jaakkola, 2012; [3] Anderson and Wynstra, 2010; [7] Brossard, 1998). Neither has research examined how buyers can absorb...