Beyond the Dyad: Electronic Commerce and Network Perspectives in Industrial Marketing Management

Abstract

To date, industrial marketing has built its conceptual frameworks upon the concept of a dyad—a relationship between one buyer and one seller. Thus, much of what has been researched in business-to-business marketing uses the buyer–seller relationship as the most appropriate unit of analysis. Yet, today, the most exciting development in business marketing is electronic commerce, which is a technology and a paradigm not of dyads but of networks. A great deal of the buyer–seller relationship between firms is being replaced or significantly transformed by electronic commerce systems. Networks pose a tremendous problem in measurement. Existing business metrics were designed for a world of concrete boundaries and fixed categories—a world that is slipping away day by day. Governments will have a keen interest in the development of metrics, as they struggle with regulation of these new entities. As boundaries between organizations blur, governments will have more trouble defining the entity that they are attempting to regulate. In the information economy, perhaps governments will recognize the essential role of “co-opetition” as an essential business strategy. For the dyad, we have the metaphor of marriage. For bureaucratic organizations, we have the metaphor of an army. What is the “similar” organization that will deliver insights about managing within a network? Perhaps the closest metaphor may be a migrating flock of birds. Thus, managers and researchers who want to understand the emerging face of technology-enabled business must come to grips with network concepts and their implications.