Title: Interfirm marketing alliance: understanding the influences of complementarity, compatibility, and combinative capacity on success

Authors: Steven H. Dahlquist

Addresses: Department of Marketing and Hospitality Services Administration, College of Business Administration, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859, USA

Abstract: Firms seek interfirm marketing alliances as a source of critical information and resources in the development of new products and services, achieving and sustaining competitive advantage, and as a means of realising returns that would be unachievable operating individually. When these linkages are strategic and take the form of a highly collaborative alliance, firms are compelled to contribute firm specific assets, make alliance specific investments, and construct alliance specific governance in an effort to leverage each other and develop new alliance specific assets that may be used to establish and maintain competitive advantage. This article provides an alliance framework that helps to explicate the interactive relationships that occur in strategic marketing alliances. It further delineates the necessity for complementarity, compatibility, and combinative capacity in the context of assets, investments, and governance. Finally, it offers seven propositions in the context of market-based assets that demonstrate the framework's potential use in future empirical research.

Keywords: strategic alliances; alliance governance; complementarity; compatibility; combinative capacity; alliance specific investment; firm specific assets; marketing relationships; marketing alliances.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSBA.2015.072033

International Journal of Strategic Business Alliances, 2015 Vol.4 No.2/3, pp.167 - 183

Received: 20 Jan 2015
Accepted: 15 Jul 2015
Published online: 29 Sep 2015 *

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