Strategic alliances & marketing partnerships : gaining competitive advantage through collaboration and partnering / Richard Gibbs and Andrew Humphries.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Strategic Alliances and Marketing Partnerships will help you to understand how partnerships function and how you can manage them more effectively and efficiently. Based on solid research and dealing with key topics such as supply chain management, marketing channels and relationship management, it identifies the key factors that determine partnering excellence. Whatever the nature of the relationship - whether outsourcing, strategic alliances or co-manufacturing, there are eight distinctive relationship types identified by the authors 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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• About the authors (p. ix)
• Foreword (p. xi)
• Introduction: Placing a value on your key commercial partnerships (p. 1)
• 1 The business of partnering (p. 13)
• A crisis in management (p. 13)
• Diminishing sources of competitive advantage (p. 15)
• From product-base competition to knowledge-base advantage (p. 17)
• Extending the boundaries of the firm (p. 19)
• The strategic value of partnering (p. 22)
• Partnering and competing supply chains (p. 28)
• The problems of understanding your partners (p. 31)
• 2 The evolution of partnership-driven business strategies (p. 37)
• Introduction (p. 37)
• The development of supply chain management (p. 38)
• Supply chain networks (p. 48)
• Strategic alliances (p. 50)
• Marketing channels (p. 52)
• Managing buy-sell relationships (p. 57)
• Conclusion (p. 63)
• 3 The obstacles and drivers of successful partnerships (p. 65)
• Introduction (p. 65)
• Leveraging mutual investments (p. 66)
• Learning from each other (p. 71)
• Governance (p. 74)
• The influence of leadership and control mechanisms (p. 77)
• Understanding partnership performance (p. 79)
• Proactive relationship management (p. 85)
• Summary (p. 89)
• 4 Relationship marketing: a 'new-old' theory of business relationships (p. 91)
• Marketing foundations (p. 91)
• Relationship marketing rediscovered (p. 92)
• Collaborate or fail (p. 94)
• From power management to relationship management (p. 97)
• The relationship business (p. 98)
• Modelling the marketing relationship (p. 100)
• Managing partnership value (p. 108)
• Building relationship management capabilities (p. 110)
• Summary (p. 111)
• 5 Understanding partnership and alliance dynamics (p. 115)
• Introduction (p. 115)
• A 'new economic' view of partnerships (p. 116)
• Partnerships as spiral dynamics (p. 119)
• Finding the measure of partnership performance (p. 122)
• Conclusion (p. 141)
• 6 Working hard at the 'soft' factors (p. 143)
• Introduction (p. 143)
• Evaluating partnership performance (p. 144)
• Opportunities and challenges created through collaborative innovation (p. 148)
• Opportunities and challenges created through partnership quality (p. 153)
• Opportunities and challenges of creating value (p. 157)
• The model of partnership performance (p. 161)
• Summary (p. 162)
• 7 The Gibbs+Humphries Partnership Types (p. 165)
• Introduction (p. 165)
• Evangelists (p. 166)
• Stable Pragmatists (p. 171)
• Rebellious Teenagers (p. 176)
• Evolving Pessimists (p. 180)
• Captive Sharks (p. 184)
• Cherry Pickers (p. 188)
• No Can Dos (p. 192)
• Deserters (p. 196)
• Summary (p. 199)
• 8 Making partnerships and alliances work for you (p. 203)
• Management implications (p. 203)
• Determining the right partnership type (p. 204)
• Partnership types and market development (p. 210)
• Relationship management and the Gibbs+Humphries Partnership Types (p. 211)
• The Gibbs+Humphries Partnership Types and marketing (p. 219)
• Conclusion (p. 223)
• Further reading (p. 227)
• Index (p. 229)

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