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When are brands or relationships more important in B2B? : A moderation analysis of a proposed model

Rist-Christensen, Fredrik; Torgersen Ravndal, Bjørn
Master thesis
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URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2469548
Date
2017
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  • Master of Science [1525]
Abstract
Although recent B2B marketing research suggest that branding and

relationships are of importance to firm performance, no research examines how

these constructs act in the same model. We try to merge these two streams of

literature by 1) proposing a model wherein branding and relationships are included

as independent variables predicting the dependent variable share of wallet (SOW),

2) testing whether these constructs substitute each other depending on the context

of the transaction, and 3) testing the moderating effects of purchase characteristics,

relationship characteristics, buyer characteristics, and market characteristics.

Our email survey collects qualitative and quantitative data among 131

Norwegian firms’ purchasing managers across different industries. Given the

relatively small data set of complete responses, we conduct a PLS-SEM analysis

using the SmartPLS 3 (Ringle, Wende and Becker 2015) software.

Our findings cannot substantially support that there exists a substitution

effect between brand and relationships as we are unable to confirm the related

hypotheses. Despite the lack of evidence regarding substitution, we do find

significant main effects of brand knowledge and relationship quality on SOW. The

most important contribution of this study is the five moderating effects. First, when

customer-perceived value (CPV) is high, relationship quality has a larger effect on

SOW. Second, when relationship specific investments (RSI) are high, relationship

quality has a larger effect on SOW. Third, when buying center heterogeneity (BCH)

is high, relationship quality has a larger effect on SOW. Fourth, when buying center

time pressure (BCTP) is high, brand has a smaller effect on SOW. Finally, brand

has a larger effect on SOW for services than for products.

We argue that our study has important theoretical and managerial

implications as we are among the first to align relationship marketing and brand

management research in the B2B field. We also suggest several future research

directions.

Keywords: B2B marketing, brand awareness, brand image, brand

knowledge, brand identification, partial least squares structural equation modeling

(PLS-SEM), relationship commitment, relationship trust, relationship satisfaction,

relationship quality, service quality, share of wallet (SOW).
Description
Masteroppgave(MSc) in Master of Science in Business, Marketing - Handelshøyskolen BI, 2017
Publisher
BI Norwegian Business School

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