Development of B2B marketing theory

Despite the practice of B2B marketing dating back several thousand years, B2B marketing studies did not exist in significant numbers prior to the last three decades and we are now in the a stage of accelerated theory development. Contributions to B2B theory began at the end of the 1800s and in the early 1900s, but developments in the last decades have inspired this paper to study how the B2B marketing theory has evolved. The transition from an economic foundation to one built on the behavioral sciences and the recent wider applicability of B2B marketing theory towards other marketing fields is viewed in this paper as an exciting journey and is the focus of this paper. A historic development of the contributions reveals new knowledge on B2B research development and its applicability which is beneficial not only for researchers in B2B marketing research and industrial firms, but also other marketing fields. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.