Lone Wolf or Social Monkey? The Role of Marketing Outsourcing in the Development of Second-Order Marketing Competences

摘要

Outsourcing has been widely recognized as an important trend in business marketing in recent decades(Ahearne and Kothandaraman,2009).Firms generally decide to outsource one or several of these marketing activities to either cut costs or access internally unavailable capabilities.While the positive overall trade-off is apparent from the trend of increasing levels of outsourcing,the exploration and generation of new marketing capabilities can be severely hurt as a result.Outsourcing decisions imply discarding the potential incremental improvements in the current marketing competences,which raises the question of whether marketing outsourcing can serve as a source for developing new marketing competences.The existing literature suggests that the client firm usually becomes highly dependent on the marketing service provider's capabilities and performance(Lacity and Will-cocks,2017).Based on this idea,most client companies do not take advantage of their interactions with more knowledgeable providers to enhance their own marketing capabilities,which leads us to propose the following research question:"To what extent and under which circumstances can a company regard marketing outsourcing as an organizational learning experience?"