MANAGING BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS IN A CHANGING WORLD

Many global and regional as well as technological processes have had an dramatic impact on business relationships in industrial markets. A number of internal and external factors can be identified that are having an impact on how relationships are formed and managed that were not present in the 1970s and 1980s. The fact that organisational functions are no longer clearly defined (the sales department doesn't sell anymore), and the prevalence of new strategic themes (delayering, outsourcing, business process engineering, cost reduction, etc.) are two examples of internal changes. External changes would include the changing nature of economies (from manufacturing to service based), information technology (permitting very different kinds of relationships), globalisation, technological change, and the increase in single souring. The objective of the "Managing Business Networks" Project is to develop our understanding of how these factors, both internal and external, have changed the way in which managers use relationships for competitive advantage. Relationships, networks, and interactions are all considerably more complex now, and it is the goal of the project to delayer this complexity, thereby contributing both to theoretical developments in understanding marketing in the information age, and also to inform managers of how to deploy new marketing tools for competitive advantage. Professor Peter Naudé (University of Bath) is the project co-ordinator.