The mediating role of commitment in healthcare B2B marketing

Abstract

Business to business transactions in pharmaceutical and healthcare industries may differ from those in other industries in terms of relational marketing factors such as customer acquisition and retention. Purchasing representatives, including medical physicians, may differ in their levels of commitment; this difference plays a mediating role in satisfaction, dependence, and intention to repurchase. This article begins by analyzing the structural relationships among these three variables: commitment, satisfaction, and dependence. The relationships are dichotomized into two dimensions: individual and organizational, and marketing performance is measured as repurchase intention. A critical literature review was conducted to identify key variables and derive their constructs. The subsequent empirical analyses have far-reaching implications from a marketing perspective.

Keywords:

• healthcare B2B
• commitment
• satisfaction
• dependence
• repurchase intention

Notes

Trust not only affects satisfaction and dependence, but also is one of the salient determinants of the level of commitment (Garbarino & Johnson, 1999; Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Sharma & Patterson, 2000). However, in the present study, trust was highly correlated with satisfaction and dependence, especially dependence, which rendered the sole effect of trust undetected. Therefore, satisfaction and dependence were determined to be antecedents of commitment. Other researchers' opinions are that satisfaction is an antecedent of trust (Ganesan, 1994; Garbarino & Johnson, 1999; Morgan & Hunt, 1994) and that trust is an antecedent of satisfaction (Anderson & Narus, 1990).

This assumption will be tested in H7 and H8.