Levels of Analysis in Business-to-Business Marketing

ABSTRACT Over the last 50 plus years, many authors have contributed to our understanding of business markets. As this research area is complex, researchers have addressed issues from different levels of analysis hereby also using a variety of theories (e.g., economics, sociology, psychology). In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of those contributions and to shed light on research in business-to-business marketing as a discipline, it is important to define the different levels of analysis so that the different studies can be viewed in relation to each other. Therefore, this paper develops such framework for business-to-business marketing. The framework also sensitizes researchers to the relationship between the level of analysis and the level at which data is collected. Furthermore, the framework can be applied to map the research areas within the business-to-business marketing field and to define areas of further investigation.

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