Strategic Alliances & Marketing Partnerships: Gaining Competitive Advantage through Collaboration and Partnering

Whatever the nature of the relationship, there are eight distinctive relationship types identified by the authors of this innovative book, to help managers optimize their business to business partnerships.

With case studies from prominent, global organizations such as Walmart, Toyota, General Motors and Dell, Strategic Alliances and Marketing Partnerships will help you to understand the problems that affect partnering and how to make effective management decisions to improve both the relationship and productivity.

About the Authors

Richard Gibbs and Andrew Humphries have a unique mix of hands-on experience and academic research and understanding.

Richard’s career spans senior sales and marketing positions in major multinational companies such as Xerox and Novell Inc. Most recently he was responsible for European distribution operations at Xerox where he architected the transition from fragmented to centralized distribution services and managed the dispersed account team charged with managing established and new distributor relationships. He has also been responsible for European channel management, strategy planning and business management.

Richard’s business roles are reflected in his academic interests. He has a PhD from the University of Gloucestershire where his thesis investigated the importance of relationship marketing within marketing channels and strategic alliances. Richard has an MBA from Henley Management College and is continuing his research into various aspects of inter-organizational relationships within Europe, specifically addressing how firms can gain competitive advantage through their marketing channels.

Andrew completed a 34-year career in the Royal Air Force culminating as Head of UK Defence Aviation Logistics. He founded SCCI Ltd, a company located in Milton Keynes, UK that specializes in measuring the effectiveness of and diagnosing the improvement opportunities in collaborative business relationships. His technique successfully helped to increase customer/supplier loyalty, revitalize troubled partnerships and provide performance metrics for improved governance in rail, construction, manufacturing, retail, agriculture and defense sector organizations.

Andrew gained his PhD from Cranfield School of Management and his MBA from the Open University. He continues to research the subject of collaboration between organizations and works with a number of universities in the UK and Europe. He has published widely in academic journals such as the British Journal of Management, the European Journal of Marketing, the International Journal of Logistics Management and the Journal of Service Research. He has been featured in the Financial Times, has written for trade and professional magazines and is a speaker at international conferences.

The authors’ research programmes, which lay the foundation of this book, came together as a collaborative initiative spurred by a series of common findings and a motivation to provide operational management with a set of practical tools that will increase the likelihood of partnering excellence.