Towards an empirically based taxonomy of buyer-seller relations in business markets

To develop appropriate theories of business relationship management we need to understand what types of relations exist and the differing types of problems they pose for the firms involved. We report the results of research to develop an empirically based taxonomy of buyer-seller business relations from data that include both buyer and seller firm perspectives. Cluster analysis is used to identify five types of relations based on measures of relationship atmosphere that share similarities and some important differences with previous typologies. A comparison of typologies shows that some obscure and confound relationship types by forcing them into predefined groups, that the same type of relationship atmosphere is compatible with more than one pattern of behavior and that the estimated correlations among relationship variables are sensitive to the mix of relations included in the sample. Future research that can build on this work, the challenges that this kind of research presents and the methodologies to help address them are then discussed.