Digital mediation in business-to-business marketing: A bibliometric analysis

• Published in: Industrial marketing management Vol. 85; pp. 126 - 140
• Main Authors: Kumar, Bipul, Sharma, Arun, Vatavwala, Sanket, Kumar, Prashant
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.02.2020
• ISSN: 0019-8501; 1873-2062
• DOI: 10.1016/j.indmarman.2019.10.002

Digital mediation in business-to-business marketing is becoming increasingly important to firms, due to customer needs and evolving technological environments. The extensive research in this area for the past twenty years has created a need to synthesize extant research. This paper examines the literature in the domain, to create a classification scheme for subdomains and to explore future research directions. This study reviews 119 relevant articles published in 29 journals between January 1999 and March 2019, to detail the domain. In addition to providing details on most cited articles and published authors, our analysis classifies the digitally mediated business-to-business marketing literature into four subject clusters—a framework for digitally mediated business-to-business marketing, the digital business-to-business marketplace, value creation through digital marketing, and the use of social media for business-to-business marketing. Four shifts in the literature are described: the emergence of Internet research and business-to-business technology; the evolution of e-commerce; the focus on social media; and the broadening of research. Finally, directions for future research are identified and discussed. •This paper integrates the existing literature in digital mediation in business-to-business marketing.•This study reviews 119 relevant articles published in 29 journals between January 1999 and March 2019.•It classifies the digitally mediated business-to-business marketing literature in four clusters.•Four shifts in the digitally mediated business-to-business marketing literature are described.