۱- Introduction

۲- Theory and hypotheses

۳- Method

۴- Results

۵- Discussion

۶- Conclusion

References

Abstract

The authors investigate how a firm’s position in a network of marketing alliances affects performance for firms experiencing different levels of uncertainty. A more prominent position—having many, well-connected marketing alliances—is typically theorized to improve the performance of a firm. However, we find that a prominent network position can instead hurt performance when uncertainty is high. Practically, these results can help both researchers and practitioners identify when the risks of marketing alliances outweigh the rewards. Theoretically, they provide a plausible explanation for past research that failed to detect a positive relationship between marketing alliances and firm performance.

Introduction

There is a growing stream of research in marketing focused on the study of strategic alliances and how they add value (Anderson, Håkansson, & Johanson, 1994; Bucklin & Sengupta, 1993; Luo, Rindfleisch, & Tse, 2007; Rindfleisch & Moorman, 2001). This trend coincides with the recognition that many firms have shifted from hierarchical forms of governance to the more flexible and disaggregated structure provided by strategic partnerships (Achrol & Kotler, 1999). This is especially evident in technology-intensive (TI) industries like software and biotechnology where the number of firms engaging in strategic alliances has grown steadily since the 1980s (John, Weiss, & Dutta, 1999; Lavie, 2007) giving researchers both the impetus, and the data to conduct research on this phenomenon. In the current work, we focus specifically on marketing alliances, which are defined as formal agreements between two or more firms that focus on downstream value chain activities (Das, Sen, & Sengupta, 1998; Rindfleisch & Moorman, 2001; Swaminathan & Moorman, 2009). In many cases, firms form these alliances with more than one downstream partner (Fang, Lee, Palmatier, & Guo, 2016). Similarly, these downstream partners can form alliances with more than one upstream firm (Thomaz & Swaminathan, 2015). Collectively, this web of marketing alliances forms a network wherein a given alliance acts as a conduit for the flow of information and resources between otherwise unconnected firms. Consequently, each firms’ unique position in this network can affect its performance over time (Mazzola, Perrone, & Handfield, 2018; Thomaz & Swaminathan, 2015). Although the majority of research in marketing looks at (dyadic) relationships rather than the whole network, findings document a largely positive association between the use of marketing alliances and firm performance (Kalaignanam, Shankar, & Varadarajan, 2007; Swaminathan & Moorman, 2009). We argue that this view is overly optimistic and by studying these relationships from a network perspective, we can uncover important boundary conditions. To do so, we look at both prominent and entrepreneurial positions in a network of marketing alliances and hypothesize that any benefits associated with these network positions are contingent on expectations about a firm’s prospects for the future—a contingency we refer to as firm-specific uncertainty.