Every Future Needs a Past:¹A Personal View of the History ofJBBM

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to underline that the rise of the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (JBBM) cannot be explained without taking into account the development of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) at Penn State. JBBM is interpreted as one module in a bigger puzzle. It is the past that at least partly influences the future.Findings: Has JBBM walked its talk? Yes! The editors have tried to stick to their goals. Although JBBM tries to offer a variety of topics there is an emphasis on relationship marketing which somewhat narrows the perspective. A pendulum effect appears to be at play: at first, one has to convince the scientific community that relations matter. But if you are successful, the relationship topic becomes so important that it supersedes other topics. Besides the dominance of relationship topics, JBBM is characterized by internationality of all parties involved. Content-wise, special aspects are theory orientation and educational approaches when teaching B2B Marketing.Originality: The paper takes a personal view on the development of JBBM . Subjective assumptions combined with quantitative data make it possible to draw a consistent picture of the development of JBBM .

Innovation in Business-to-Business Marketing

“…Their participation and engaging on these innovation matters were paramount. After all, the birth of commercial education itself can be legitimately traced to England and several countries in Europe (Backhaus 2015;Baker 2015) with rollout to the States, Canada and Asia then and beyond (Lichtenthal, Tzempelikos, and Tellefsen 2018, 41-42).…”