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1. Introduction
The recent development of new modes of communication has changed the way we think about products, brands, partnerships and relationship management (Batra and Keller, 2016). In these new challenges, many companies have developed substantially improved digital capabilities, skills and practices to remain relevant and competitive in the marketplace (Boyd and Koles, 2018; Bouncken et al., 2019). However, for marketing leaders, success in the future will require even more aggressive moves and deeper digital transformations if companies are to remain competitive (Barreda et al., 2015). The use of social media marketing platforms as marketing channels has expanded in recent years, also driven by the ability to reach millions of customers with brand-related content while being involved in conversations of exchange of opinion (Alves et al., 2016; Hanna et al., 2011; Schivinski and Dabrowski, 2016; Eggers et al., 2016). The study of business-to-business (B2B) strategies by organizations becomes particularly important in this context (Iankova et al., 2019; Itani et al., 2017; Salo, 2017).
Although several studies have been carried out in the wider field of B2B marketing strategies particularly investigating the relationship between the customer and the client (Lonsdale and Watson, 2005; Verganti and Öberg, 2013; Sohn et al., 2013; Pedersen et al., 2020; Prior and Keränen, 2020), none of those have focused on the health-care sector.
Consequently, and to stimulate academic improvement and provide a better sense of direction for future research, we offer in this article a systematic review (Kraus et al., 2020) of this expanding literature stream on marketing in the health-care sector, which is regaining much importance especially at this timely time of the COVID-19 pandemic (Clark et al., 2020). In these times of crisis, it becomes crucial to study the health sector at the level of marketing strategies at the B2B level.
Our article aims at providing a state-of-the-art overview of questions, issues and challenges of B2B marketing strategies in the health-care sector on the basis of 59 publications in the field. More specifically, it aims to:
identify the fundamental contributions of research in this area of knowledge; and
determine the lines of research that constitute the most prominent intellectual structure to contribute to the definition of a future...