Strategic Shifts between Business Types

When firms fundamentally change the strategic orientation of their market offerings, success and failure are immediate neighbors.

In considering the benefits from a structured approach to industrial marketing, the starting point is given by business reality: industrial marketing practice covers an immense and highly heterogeneous variety of transactional processes in marketing industrial goods, ranging from marketing standard screws to computer integrated manufacturing systems or nuclear power stations.²⁹ If marketing science (or, as Kotler (1972) puts it, marketing management science) aims at reaching beyond pure description in order to develop recommendations for business practice as it has been demanded by many scholars, it is faced with a dilemma³⁰: the heterogeneous variety of transaction situations in business practice renders any attempt to develop a marketing program which is universally applicable regardless of particularities of the transaction situation pointless. On the other hand, normative statements that solely refer to one specific situation or marketing problem will hardly deserve the label “science”.³¹ Hence, there is a need for a systematic approach which combines some abstraction from particularities in order to go beyond considerations of individual cases, with a more differentiated view on marketing problems than can be achieved by a general “one-for-all” marketing programme.³² Grouping transactions according to some criteria which are decisive for the way buyers and sellers come to agree on the exchange and carry it out seems a promising way to handle this. This procedure is referred to as “structuring” in the following, regardless of the concrete method and attributes of the grouping (content of criteria, number of groups, etc.). In industrial marketing, a particularly popular approach to structuring is the typological approach.³³

In view of the empirically observable dynamics of the market place and theoretical assertions like Hayek’s statement that “…economic problems arise always and only in consequence of change…”³⁶⁷ it seems worthwhile to reach beyond a static typology of transactions and explore the potential of the business types concept to explain some of these dynamic issues. Such a view necessarily implies that the discriminating criteria for categorization are no longer regarded as data but as variables which are susceptible to deliberate design by the involved actors. The need for such further investigation and, at the same time, for its potential fruitfulness arises from two different perspectives, as indicated above, namely from a theoretical and from an empirical point of view.

“… change can be seen as an outcome jointly determined by motivation to change, opportunity to change, and capability to change.”⁶⁵⁷ While generally subscribing to this assertion, application on the issue of strategic shifts between business types constellations requires some rearrangements: it is seen as an outcome jointly determined by the motivation to change, the general perception of a window of opportunity, and the ability to implement the concrete change at favorable conditions. This boils down to three central questions from the seller’s perspective⁶⁵⁸.