International Buying Center Analysis – The Status Quo of Research

Abstract

In industrial markets purchasing decisions are made by buying centers. Sellers thus have to analyze buying centers in order to generate effective strategies and measures. If we consider progressive economic globalization in this context, it becomes clear that a success promising analysis of buying centers cannot take place from a purely national perspective. On the contrary, the current ongoing globalization process emphasizes the importance of international investigation perspectives and the need to obtain international findings regarding market powers, processes and decision-making elements. There are numerous differences between buying centers in different countries. However, the international buying center analysis is only at an early stage of development. Most studies only analyze one aspect of the complex multipersonal decision process and mostly only for few countries. Thus we identify a lack of comprehensiveness in international buying center research and reveal some interesting starting points for further research.

Towards a better understanding of organizational buying behavior across cultures: empirical evidence from the Arabian Gulf

“…All these powers have received thorough research attention (Reid and Plank, 2000), yet a sub-set of environmental influences stemming from the dynamics of national cultures has largely remained unexplored. The studies that did look into international differences in the buying centers did not link those differences to specific national cultural traits (Herbst et al , 2008), which has created an incomplete picture of OBB in a globalized business environment. Specifically, although the traditional OA taxonomy (Webster and Wind, 1972) is aptly descriptive for the contexts in which it originated, that is, mature markets marked by individualism, low power distance (Hofstede et al , 2010) and universalism (Hooker, 2003), it might be unable to capture accurately the configurations of the buying center in the world regions with a dissimilar cultural profile.…”