Looking Beyond the Horizon: How to Approach the Customers ...

Christian Homburg, Halina Wilczek, & Alexander Hahn

Looking Beyond the Horizon: How to Approach the Customers' Customers

in Business-to-Business Markets

Suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) markets often approach their customers' customers with marketing activities. However, marketing research lacks an integrative conceptualization of this phenomenon. The authors address this void by conceptualizing a B2B supplier's marketing approaches to indirect customers. Drawing on a literature review and a qualitative empirical study, the authors identify three indirect customer marketing approaches: direct customer downstream support, cooperative indirect customer marketing, and independent indirect customer marketing. They also propose external (value chain-related) and internal (B2B supplier-related) moderators that influence the relationship between a B2B supplier's marketing approaches to indirect customers and its financial performance. The authors argue that although power constellations and product value contribution in the value chain determine the specific indirect customer marketing approach that will lead to financial success, internal professionalization of a B2B supplier's organizational structure and processes further strengthens the positive financial impact of each approach.

Keywords: customers' customers, indirect customer marketing, derived demand, business-to-business marketing, qualitative research

Many business-to-business (B2B) suppliers actively manage relationships with not only their direct customers but also those customers' customers (Dahlquist and Griffith 2014). Such a strategy provides B2B suppliers with valuable information on downstream market characteristics, creates product preferences among indirect customers, and ultimately aims at stimulating derived demand (Webster 2000). Network equipment sup plier Cisco, for example, delivers its systems to service providers but also approaches the service providers' cus tomers to learn about their requirements. Similarly, B2B companies across a broad range of industries and market stages approach their customers' customers with various marketing activities. Figure 1 shows illustrative examples.

Despite the high relevance of indirect customers for B2B suppliers, research insights into this domain remain scarce and mainly business-to-consumer (B2C) oriented. Although isolated studies on market orientation, ingredient branding, and push-pull marketing have acknowledged the importance of considering subsequent market stages beyond the direct customers, no conceptualization has com bined the different perspectives and enriched that combina-

Christian Homburg is Professor of Marketing, Chair of the Marketing Department, and Director of the Institute for Market-Oriented Management, University of Mannheim, as well as Professorial Fellow, Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne (e-mail: homburg@ bwl.uni-mannheim.de). Halina Wilczek is a doctoral student, Marketing Department, University of Mannheim (e-mail: halina.wilczek@bwl. uni-mannheim.de). Alexander Hahn is Project Manager, HYVE AG (email: alexander.hahn@). Inge Geyskens served as area editor for this article.

tion with evidence from B2B markets (see Table 1). Most recently, research has called attention to the need for an integrated conceptual framework for this underresearched topic (Grewal and Lilien 2012). We address this research gap and provide three contributions to previous research.

First, this study provides a synthesis of the various indi rect customer marketing activities proposed in the literature and complements them with findings from a qualitative field study with 30 B2B suppliers to develop a parsimo nious but comprehensive conceptualization of indirect cus tomer marketing in B2B markets. Specifically, we assign single activities to three overarching approaches: direct cus tomer downstream support, cooperative indirect customer marketing, and independent indirect customer marketing. Moreover, we demonstrate that these approaches represent different levels of how intensively B2B suppliers rely on their indirect customers versus their direct customers. From a managerial standpoint, the framework is broadly applica ble to a range of B2B situations and provides guidance to B2B suppliers on options for incorporating the derivative nature of their demand into their marketing strategies.

Second, this research adds to the understanding of the external value chain conditions under which the three approaches enhance a B2B supplier's success. From a B2B supplier's standpoint, it is important to know these condi tions because misallocation of resources to the respective approaches may hurt performance through nonrealized downstream value capture as well as through conflicts with direct and indirect customers. Existing research has empha sized that successful marketing to indirect customers requires some observable product value for indirect cus-

? 2014, American Marketing Association

ISSN: 0022-2429 (print), 1547-7185 (electronic)

58

Journal of Marketing Vol. 78 (September 2014), 58-77

FIGURE 1 Graphical Definition of Study Scope and Illustrative Examples

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