Conceptual approaches to relational intervention in B2B partnerships

Marketing executives responsible for inter-firm collaboration live in a world in which business partnerships are popular, but often risky, unstable and vulnerable to failure with less than 50% of the arrangements performing satisfactorily. There is evidence to suggest that marketing academics have undervalued the role of strategy implementation. It is in this context that the author argues that both marketing academics and practitioner s could benefit from an increased academic focus into the development of intervention strategies to facilitate the improved efficacy of implementation and management problems within the context of business partnering relationships. To examine this issue the structure of this paper is firstly to start with a brief examination of alternative approaches to intervention problem solving so as to define a methodology that marketing academics and practitioners could use to efficaciously deal with inter-firm relationship problems. Secondly, a situational contingency model is adapted from situational leadership theory to consider the business partnering context. Alternative situational contingencies are outlined and based on these contingencies the author proposes a range of intervention strategy approaches defined as either directive, collaborative, persuasive and delegative.