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The purpose of this paper is to identify what managerial implications research related to inter-organizational interfaces has been produced in marketing. For this aim, the authors focus on a specific concept implemented in many firms that operate on business-to-business markets, which is key account management (KAM).

The authors used the Ebsco Database entering “account management” as a key word in the title row. The search provided 51 papers to which the authors added four MSI reports written by Moriarty and Shapiro between 1980 and 1984. The authors then identified such keywords as “managers”, “practitioners”, “marketers”, “managerial”, “business”, and their variations as well as normative words such as “should”, “must”, etc. in order to identify managerial implications.

Four main findings are provided: a clear managerial purpose is affirmed by KAM academic works whether as a central “purpose” of the works or as “implications”; these managerial implications may display different forms (dimensions to be considered, consequences to anticipate, advices); though the managerial scope of KAM works is clearly visible, the sophistication of managerial recommendations remains … limited; the identification of who is exactly “the manager” targeted by the implications remains vague.

The authors discuss the notion of managerial relevance of academic research.

The authors explore sources for practices (whether they are the ones of scholars or managers) that could help “spelling out more effectively the managerial implications.

To the knowledge this is the first work that reviews so precisely how academic articles address to the managerial audience on a precise issue. Furthermore, the authors believe that KAM is an interesting and appropriate field for such a review because it is widely implemented on business markets.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse what roles different relational norms play in long‐term business relationships.

The paper uses exploratory factor analysis on a data set of n=297 relationships and identifies two norm dimensions: value‐creating norms and value‐claiming norms.

This paper demonstrates that extant empirical research on relational norms and related behaviours is fragmentary and that there is considerable overlap between certain norms. Hence, the dimensionality of the norm concept remains unclear.

This study contributes to a clearer picture of the norm construct that has been used in a fragmented and selective way in empirical studies in the past.

The concept of key account management (KAM) has received considerable attention from practitioners and scholars for well over 20 years now. However, numerous articles build on a set of tacit assumptions for which we lack empirical evidence. This paper seeks to propose an empirical test of several of these assumptions.

The contribution draws on a study conducted among 297 purchasing managers in two industries (packaging goods, market research data).

The findings indicate that parts of the foundations of KAM are not as solid as they may appear at first sight.

This paper invites managers of KAM programs to carefully consider the objectives they assign to such programs by integrating the idea of value created both for key customers and for suppliers implementing such programs.

The paper extends knowledge of key account management in the business field by providing new – and, in the light of the extant literature, sometimes rather counter‐intuitive – insights in this important management phenomenon. It does this by systematically comparing key account relationships and non‐key account relationships.

In the literature on relationships, many important aspects such as relationship outcomes (e.g. relationship quality, customer satisfaction) (Holmlund & Kock, 1995; Crosby, Evans, & Cowles, 1990; Homburg & Rudolph, 1997), antecedents (e.g. power, trust, commitment) (Kaufmann & Dant, 1992; Doney & Cannon, 1997; Morgan & Hunt, 1994), or the structure of relationships (e.g. processes, organizational approaches) (Parvatiyar & Sheth, 2000; Homburg, Workman, & Jensen, 2000) have been discussed as well as analyzed empirically.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility of using the new marketing research tool of prediction markets (PMs), which integrates customers to into the marketing research process. The research questions are: does taking part in PMs influence customers’ brand perception? Is there a danger of damaging a brand through this tool?

The paper uses a series of five short-term (less than one hour) and five long-term (three weeks) experimental online PMs where customers are integrated into marketing research and apply a series of online-surveys before and after taking part as virtual stock market traders. Subjects of research are taken from the sporting goods industry.

The paper shows that PMs can be used by marketing researchers without the danger of damaging the brand of the products that are subject of the PMs, although customers are being integrated to improve the markets’ forecasting accuracy.

The study's subject are medium priced sporting goods only. Possibly in other product fields, results may differ. Thus, the authors see a field for further research in this limitation.

Managers for marketing intelligence have more reason to make use of the efficient and rather new tool, PMs. Marketers can potentially improve their forecasting accuracy by integrating customer information into their reports. In addition, the authors see a high potential in the area of innovation management as well.

There has been no research on perceptions of PMs and brands at all so far.

Increasingly, product companies are attempting to offer solutions rather than standalone goods. However, recent field data show product companies tend to follow their product-centric doctrine to deal with solutions. In fact, the value of a solution for customers is to get their particular problems solved in the long run.

In this chapter, a new view (a circular process view) of solutions is introduced to help product companies to cocreate sustainable solutions with their customers. Derived from this new view, the required distinctive capabilities for organizing sustainable customer solutions are elaborated. They are (1) understanding the customer’s actual and ongoing needs, (2) organizing responsive systems integration, (3) ensuring continuous customer value creation, and (4) sustaining the solution in the network.

The purpose of this paper involves evaluating the impact of coopetition on the innovation activities and innovation performance of companies.

The study deployed data from the Community Innovation Survey – CIS 2012 and subject to the application of different multivariate statistical analysis processes.

The authors furthermore conclude that coopetition and the transfer of knowledge to and from competitors generates a statistically significant positive impact on company innovation-related activities and performance.

This work enriches the theory of innovation from the perspectives of game-theoretic strategic and resource theory approach. Moreover, the findings provide several recommendations for managers to effectively conduct firm’s coopetition strategy on innovation performance.