Business-to-Business Marketing Textbooks: A Comparative Review

ABSTRACT

Even in times of e-learning and multimedia, textbooks play a great part in business marketing education. For this reason and in order to help instructors select the appropriate textbook for their course setting, a comprehensive overview of textbooks currently available on the market seemed a sensible idea. This holds even if only to see what the available structural approaches to the subject are and to identify current mainstream thinking and specific views on business marketing problems. This review article is meant to provide educators and researchers with a commented overview on business marketing textbooks-not only those written in English, but also in other languages like Chinese, Italian, Hungarian or German. While the main focus was placed on the identified 16 English textbooks, this article also found that there is a “world beyond English textbooks” that might be worth looking at, because non-English textbooks in part offer approaches and content presently not available in English. These may be used as a source for developing new ideas and to (re)design the business marketing curriculum/course.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparison of textbooks
• industrial marketing
• business-to-business marketing
• business education
• pedagogy
• textbook analysis