Social media research in the industrial marketing field: Review of literature and future research directions

Highlights

• Provides a review of the current state of research on social media research in the industrial marketing field.

• Identifies the research avoids in the research area.

• Presents future research and application areas for academics and managers.

Abstract

Since the emergence of social media, industrial marketing academics and marketers have also been intrigued by the influence of such media on the discipline. As, social media research in the field of industrial marketing has been of increasing interest, this research attempts to review and assess the advances in social media research in the industrial marketing field. From the literature review conducted, it can be identified that some of the research areas have witnessed steady theory development increases, e.g., sales and marketing communications, while others are clearly lagging behind, e.g., pricing and ethics. Also methodological pluralism is called for instead of more traditional methods (conceptual analysis, qualitative and survey) to establish and solve more nuanced research problems. This research provides a review of the current state of research in the field and suggests directions for future development.

Introduction

Industrial marketing has been researched from multiple theoretical and methodological viewpoints for several decades, which has resulted in several helpful reviews and syntheses of the current literature (Möller, 2013, Reid and Plank, 2000, Wiersema, 2013). In the last four decades or so, information technology in its various forms has been of interest for industrial management practice and marketing (???, Mathews et al., 1977, Trainor et al., 2011). Within the information technology field, one of the latest achievements is social media and its social media applications and networking sites which have been increasingly utilized and studied, especially in the business-to-consumer marketing context (De Vries et al., 2012, Hoffman and Fodor, 2010, Lamberton and Stephen, 2015, Nadeem et al., 2015).

Now, industrial companies en mass have embraced this novel technology. However, it has also been pointed out that even though industrial marketing practice is benefitting from social media used by marketers, research on that area is still argued to be in the embryonic stage (Siamagka, Christodoulides, Michaelidou, & Valvi, 2015), and further research is called for (Wiersema, 2013).

In this research, we argue that some of the research gaps, especially those related to adoption, barriers, and reasons to use social media, are slowly being filled in by academic research. As a result of the literature review conducted, we also point to areas where further research is undoubtedly beneficial, for example, in pricing, social media influences on organizational decision-making or on buying center.

Against this backdrop, this study aims to answer the following research question: How much research exists on the social media deployment in the industrial marketing area, and what are the possible future research directions for industrial marketing? In addition to the literature review, this research aims to integrate some of the theoretical developments and show the abundance and deficiencies in the current research to aid marketing scholars, decision-makers, and marketers.

Similarly to the business marketing theory mapping of Möller (2013) and Reid and Plank (2000), in our critical analysis and literature review, we reviewed 40 research articles that specifically focus on the topics of social media use by industrial companies. Based on the review, we provide a state of the art overview of the current literature. As a result, this research shows the current state of knowledge of how social media has been influencing and is utilized by industrial companies as a form of an integrative framework, which also depicts future research avenues.

The structure of the paper is as follows: first, the methodology is presented, and then, the review of the current research on social media use and influences on industrial marketing is analyzed and synthesized. Afterward, the abundant and deficient areas are identified in an integrative framework. Finally, the conclusions are presented.