Paper info

New avenues for research in reference marketing

Andre Morgado

The paper was published at the 33rd IMP-conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2017.

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The scientific community has produced research on customer references. Nevertheless, the circumstances associated with general customer reference practices that allow for the establishment of a successful customer-vendor relationship have yet to be fully determined and additional research is needed on customer referencing. The purpose of this paper is to uncover new avenues for research within this subject. To achieve this aim, the author conducted a non-systematic theoretical research, which suggests that although the major stream of thought on customer referencing is derived from the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing community, the industrial networks framework has not yet been applied to the study of customer referencing. As a result, the author concludes that further research demands expanding the empirical unit of analysis to embrace the entire triadic network and to include all of the established dyadic relationships.