Business-to-business marketing: the theoretical integration of servitization, service-dominant- logic and customer experience

Glanfield, Keith, Bolton, Niki and Almoraish, Ahmed ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4724-9204 2025. Business-to-business marketing: the theoretical integration of servitization, service-dominant- logic and customer experience. Presented at: Advances in Management and Innovation, Cardiff, UK, 21-22 May 2025.

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Abstract

Business-to-Business Marketing (BtoB) is very different from Business-to-Consumer Marketing. For example buyer decision making is more complex, purchasing cycles are longer and involve many more steps, market information is at best partial, building relationships is more difficult and media to reach potential buyers is specialist and fragmented ( Zimerman and Blythe, 2021). These stark differences imply that theoretical development of marketing theory for BtoB markets is likely to be based upon phenomena within that domain and, given its very distinct characteristics, new and novel thinking is likely to be grounded in that domain rather than borrowed from others. Yet for some very important theoretical foundations of BtoB this is not the case. For example some foundations are established in the business-to-consumer literature and then retrospectively and separately applied to BtoB marketing. Two prominent examples of this are customer experience (Becker and Jaakola, 2020) and service- dominant-logic (SD-L) (Vargo and Lusch, 2016). Another instance is where marketing theory is developed in another business and management discipline and directly applies to BtoB marketing. For example servitization (Beltagui et al, 2022) is a research area of the operations management research domain, examining how organisations can augment and develop their BtoB product offerings by augmenting and differentiating them through the development of BtoB services. Currently the three prior mentioned research domains are not brought together and integrated in the BtoB marketing literature. This short conceptual paper, therefore, aims to theoretically integrate servitisation, SD-L and customer experience in a BtoB marketing context. This paper emerged from taking a research based teaching approach to the Cardiff Met MBA marketing module in newly introducing the above three domains into the module and in doing so examining them as whole and integrating them in a BtoB context.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	24 May 2025
Date of Acceptance:	18 February 2025
Last Modified:	26 Jun 2025 15:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/178492

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