The state of business to business marketing research

Business to business marketing research is very healthy, with over 200 papers published in leading journals annually, primarily in Industrial Marketing Management and the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing. In this review of the field, several inflection points are noted that led to current emphases in areas such as innovation, relationships, and technology, but also led to some divergence from practice. This convergence into certain theoretical perspectives and divergence from practice creates significant opportunities for researchers to re-imagine areas that have languished, such as buyer behavior, in order to address contemporary practices such as account-based marketing. The paper also introduces the idea of oppositional research as a method of building out the theory.