Plural forms and dual distribution: the “external” party’s perspective and the role of path dependency

Alberto Sa Vinhas ()
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Alberto Sa Vinhas: Carson College of Business, Washington State University

Marketing Letters, 2022, vol. 33, issue 3, No 8, 443-469

Abstract: Abstract Increasingly, marketing activity takes place within complex organizational structures. One example of this is the so-called 'plural forms’ structure, where a buyer and a supplier perform the same activity or produce the same input simultaneously. Past research on plural forms has tended to focus on the buyer and on how it can benefit from the parallel use of different organizational forms. Considerably, less is known about the other party in a plural form system. We study this phenomenon in the context of dual distribution channels, where a company-owned salesforce and independent resellers perform parallel distribution functions. Taking the reseller’s perspective, we propose that (1) its long-term relationship outcomes have path-dependent origins which follow from a dual channel’s particular evolutionary path and (2) the magnitude of these path-dependent effects depends on the particular upstream and downstream competitive conditions. We test our hypotheses in a rich cross-industry sample of industrial resellers. We find that reseller relationships where manufacturers did not have a direct selling operation in place before initiating the relationship with the reseller have better relationship outcomes in terms of relationship satisfaction, transaction costs, and the level of information sharing, when compared to dual distribution situations where manufacturers added the in-house operation after initiating the relationship with the reseller; upstream competition attenuates this effect, while downstream competition aggravates it.

Keywords: Plural forms; Dual distribution; Inter-firm relationships; Path dependency; Relationship outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s11002-021-09605-4

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