What can we learn from marketers? A bibliometric analysis of the marketing literature on business model research

Abstract

Strategic management has extensively contributed to the development of business model research. Although marketing concepts (e.g., customers, value creation, delivery, and exchange) form an essential part of any business model description, from an academic standpoint, the strategy literature has been slow to incorporate contributions from the marketing literature on business model research. Drawing on mixed bibliometric techniques combining co-citation analysis (CCA) and bibliographic coupling analysis (BCA), we seek to fill this gap by exploring the origins and trends of business model research in marketing journals (285 articles published in 38 marketing journals). The CCA reveals three theoretical pillars labelled ‘business model rationale in marketing’, ‘business model conceptual origins’, and ‘business model literature developments’ that provide a consistent base for cross-fertilization. The BCA uncovers eight conversations organized into two research streams, namely ‘holistic perspective’ and ‘downstream perspective’. Considering these results, we discuss the partial appropriation of marketing issues by strategists and propose a three-pronged research agenda based on consumer data as a major source of competitive advantage.

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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.