A Configurational Perspective on Key Account Management

Most firms struggle with the challenge of managing their key customer accounts. There is a significant gap between the importance of this organizational design problem in practice and the research attention paid to it. Sound academic research on key account management (KAM) is limited and fragmented...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of marketing Vol. 66; no. 2; pp. 38 - 60
Main Authors Homburg, Christian, Workman, John P., Jensen, Ove
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago American Marketing Association 01.04.2002
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Business
Business structures
Customer information files
Customers
Divisions
Industrial management
Joint products
Literature reviews
Marketing
Marketing management
Personal selling
Product development
Relationship marketing
Sales
Sales management
Statistical analysis
Studies
Taxonomy
United States > US
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Summary:Most firms struggle with the challenge of managing their key customer accounts. There is a significant gap between the importance of this organizational design problem in practice and the research attention paid to it. Sound academic research on key account management (KAM) is limited and fragmented. Drawing on research on KAM and team selling, the authors develop an integrative conceptualization of KAM and define key constructs in four areas: (1) activities, (2) actors, (3) resources, and (4) approach formalization. Adopting a configurational perspective to organizational research, the authors then use numerical taxonomy to empirically identify eight prototypical KAM approaches on the basis of a cross-industry, cross-national study. The results show significant performance differences among the approaches. Overall, the article builds a bridge between marketing organization research and relationship marketing research.
ISSN:0022-2429
1547-7185
DOI:10.1509/jmkg.66.2.38.18471