Upstream Supplier, Buyer’s Outside Marketing Competencies And Performance: An Outside-In Perspective

Abstract

Employing an outside-in approach, we address an under-researched question in the extant outside-in marketing literature: How and when do manufacturing firms, by virtue of their supplier, manage to achieve superior performance? We find that supplier assist their buyer in enhancing performance via their impact on the outside-in marketing competency of the buyer. Supplier sharing information and being flexible provides a basis for the buyer to update its outside in marketing competency leading to performance advantage. Using survey data from 31 manufacturing firms in Pakistan our results suggest that modeling supplier information sharing and flexibility along with outside-in marketing competency of buyer provides a more accurate picture of buyer performance outcomes and enhances the efficacy of outside-in marketing competency logic with respect to buyer performance. We also show that the outside-in marketing competency of buyer positively affects buyer performance when transformational leadership is relatively high. The results suggest that buyers stand to gain more from their outside-in marketing competency by devoting resources for developing leadership skills. We conclude this study by discussing the implication of this research for theory and practice, highlighting the limitations and offering future research directions.