The rising impact of customer engagement is increasingly evident in business markets. This paper studies customer referencing as an important manifestation of engagement behavior in the business-to-business (B2B) context. To extend extant research, which has thus far examined referencing almost exclusively from the seller’s viewpoint, we study how referencing affects value creation in business networks. We explore resources contributed and gained though referencing and the resulting value outcomes for the entire reference triad (the seller, the reference customer, and the prospective buyer). Empirically, the paper draws on an extensive field study conducted in knowledge-intensive business service industries. The results explicate how customer referencing affects value creation within and beyond the triad, by i) enhancing or impairing actors’ internal processes; ii) strengthening or damaging relationships between the triad actors; and iii) facilitating exchange in their broader business network. The paper contributes to research on customer referencing by explicating its role in value creation on a network level. As one of the first studies on engagement in the B2B context, this paper contributes to the emerging actor engagement research by analyzing how influencing behavior operates in a business network. These insights can help firms to facilitate exchange in complex markets.

Introduction

The dominance of firm-controlled marketing has lessened in recent decades owing to the rising impact of customer-originated influence and advocacy, recently conceptualized as manifestations of customer engagement behavior, which refers to customers’ voluntary resource contributions to a firm’s marketing function beyond those core to the transaction (e.g., Harmeling, Moffett, Arnold, & Carlson, 2016; Jaakkola & Alexander, 2014; van Doorn et al., 2010). The influence of other customers is increasingly acknowledged as a key factor affecting purchase decisions in business-to-business (B2B) markets as well (e.g., Aarikka-Stenroos & Makkonen, 2014; Anderson & Wynstra, 2010). Today’s business markets are characterized by knowledge and service intensity, technological complexity, and increasing specialization (e.g., Jacob & Ulaga, 2008), which challenges both buyers’ and sellers’ attempts to present and assess the value potential of offerings (AarikkaStenroos & Jaakkola, 2012; Aarikka-Stenroos & Makkonen, 2014). Recent industry reports (Cespedes & Bova, 2015), as well as research on industrial marketing (Salminen & Möller, 2006; Terho & Jalkala, 2017), indicate that the use of customer references has become increasingly relevant for demonstrating the value of complex offerings, thereby facilitating business exchange. Customer referencing refers to a set of practices that enables sellers to provide evidence to prospective buyers to evaluate their performance potential on the basis of previous customer relationships (Salminen & Möller, 2006; Helm & Salminen, 2010; Aarikka-Stenroos, 2011).