How developed is the marketing business model literature? Does it have anything in common with the strategic management discipline? And what are its current research domains? Professor and Dean Laurent Muzellec, Trinity Business School, and Profs. Raphaël Maucuer, ESSECA School of Management, Sébastien Ronteau, Audencia Business School, and Alexandre Renaud from EM Normandie Business School, examine marketing business model research in terms of its composition and potential to contribute to the wider business model conversation.

Deciphering Research: How can marketing contribute to our understanding of business models? By CoBS Editor Celine Sophie Lüdtke. Related research: What can we learn from marketers? A bibliometric analysis of the marketing literature on business model research, Raphaël Maucuer, Alexandre Renaud, Sébastien Ronteau and Laurent Muzellec, Long Range Planning, (2022).

Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the most important authors of English literature. His works, while entertaining during his time and still today, can also inform our understanding of contemporary social and political issues. Stephen Greenblatt, a renowned Shakespeare scholar, analyses Shakespeare’s works in the light of the actions of their political leaders in his book “Tyrant – Shakespeare on Power” (2018).

He describes populist leader Jack Cade’s approach to a rebellion in Henry VI, promising absurd changes and telling verifiably wrong facts about his ancestry. He also discusses Richard III’s complete disregard for law and general motivations for his tyranny. Greenblatt further addresses Shakespeare’s depiction of the motivations of crowds and individuals to follow tyrants and his reasoning as to why tyrants such as Macbeth or Richard III were able to come into power in the first place.

While Greenblatt never explicitly mentions modern-day “tyrants” or populist leaders, the parallels he draws in his writing, exemplified by Cade’s motivation to “make England great again”, become abundantly clear. Unexpectedly, Shakespeare’s writings offer valuable insights and new perspectives which can be translated into the field of social and political science.

Professor Muzellec and his colleagues Maucuer, Renaud and Ronteau share a similar approach to potentially combining unlikely disciplines. They assess if and how research on business models in marketing is relevant to business model research in other research fields, namely strategic management.

Beyond disciplinary boundaries

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2)

Business models are a key research domain as they illustrate how value is created and captured by a firm and finally delivered to its stakeholders. Similarly, marketing is central to understanding the activities that create and deliver customer value. Naturally, both research fields can showcase undeniable synergies, as value creation and delivery are crucial parts of their definition.

However, despite this conceptual proximity, only eight marketing articles on business models were published in 2011, compared to hundreds in other disciplines. Therefore, in this research, Maucuer, Renaud, Ronteau and Muzellec analyse the possible contribution of marketing business model literature to the strategic management field.

In greater detail, the researchers aim to explore the level of development in the literature related to marketing business models. They also seek to identify any conceptual commonalities between this literature and the discipline of strategic management and to understand the current trends in marketing business model research.

Ultimately, the results of this research would help strategists; they could, at least partially, appropriate marketing issues to gain a competitive advantage from their business model research.

Benefitting from marketing in business model research

“Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques” (Henry V, Act I, Prologue)

Expanding business model research to include marketing has several benefits. It allows researchers to enhance their understanding of the precursors leading to business model innovation, the role of customers in designing business models, and the impact of new business models on industry dynamics. Especially against the background of new technologies and increasing digitalisation, marketing is crucial to understanding user behaviour.

Marketing metrics such as customer satisfaction and lifetime value and concepts like “value-in-use” can be used as tools to operationalize and evaluate the performance of the business model. However, it is still being quite overlooked by strategists; academically, strategy literature has yet to seriously include marketing literature findings in their own business model research. With their paper , the researchers aim to identify the synergies and advantages in traditional business model research to pave the way for future studies.

Tracing back business model research

“What’s past is prologue” (The Tempest, Act II, Scene 1)

Muzellec and his fellow researchers study the bibliographic data of business model articles using bibliometrics. This employs quantitative techniques to identify citation patterns, which in turn allows for objective classification of publications related to a particular research field. Leaning on Walsh and Renaud (2017), the authors used a mixed bibliometric framework, including descriptive statistical analysis, Co-Citation Analysis (CCA), and Bibliographic Coupling Analysis (BCA).

Through CCA, the researchers aim to identify the set of references, also known as the “intellectual core,” i.e., the most cited references in the research corpus and different research concepts on which the business model literature in the marketing discipline is based. It rests on the basic idea that when two papers are cited together in a third publication, i.e., co-cited, they are likely complementary. Furthermore, researchers who co-cite the same references share similar views of their research domain; the group of documents which share the same concern or theoretical basis are known as “invisible colleagues”. To summarise, the frequency of co-citation measures the similarity between two references in each area of scholarship. On the other hand, BCA helps identify current and emerging trends. In this analysis, the number of shared references between two publications indicates their thematic closeness.

Using the Scopus database. The researchers  selected  286 articles in the marketing domain on business model research and then calculated the proximity between the documents using BCA and CCA indexes, clustered the results, and visualised them. 

The centre of business model research in marketing

“O brave new world, That has such people in’t.” (The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1)

The researchers found there to be an exponential growth of business model research in marketing, with almost 500 articles published by 2020, compared to 106 publications between 1991 and 2011. The start of this sudden growth can be traced back to the publication of influential literature reviews by Coombes and Nicholson (2013) and Ehret et al. (2013), with 230 articles on this topic ever since.

Maucuer et al. identified the 30 most influential business model articles in marketing journals. Since year 2000, 681 authors have contributed to the core business literature, with 15% of them publishing more than once. Notably, the top 3 authors in terms of publications are from Scandinavian universities. In total, 38 marketing journals have supported research on business models to varying extents. Around one-third of all articles were published in the highly influential and widely cited “Journal of Business Research”, followed by “Industrial Marketing Management” and the “Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing”. The remaining 31% of articles were published in journals with fewer than ten publications each.

The authors conclude that the marketing business model research has matured enough to be considered a credible contributor to the conversation.

Shared beginnings and conversations


“I count myself in nothing else so happy As in a soul rememb’ring my good friends” (Richard II, Act II, Scence 3)

The intellectual core identified through CCA is 36 references published between 1989 and 2018. They are anchored in various scientific backgrounds, namely marketing, strategic management, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and, to a lesser degree, general management, information systems, organisation studies, and social sciences.

These key references rest on three theoretical foundations: business model rationale in marketing, business model conceptual origins and business model literature developments.

The first group, “business model rationale” in marketing, illustrates the potential of the business model approach in addressing marketing-related issues. It focuses on a business’s upstream and downstream aspects relevant to marketing topics, such as servitisation and customer-supplier relationships. The second group, “business model conceptual origins”, essentially shows the sources of value creation. The final group the researchers identified, “business model literature developments”, emphasises business model dynamics such as design, innovation and evolution and comprises literature reviews, mostly published in “Long range Planning” and the “Strategic Management Journal”. Thus, Maucuer et al. discovered that the strategic management discipline led to the development of the literature and contributed to shaping the conversation.

The Co-Citation Analysis provides invaluable insights for the researchers by highlighting strong connections between marketing and traditional business model literature. These findings demonstrate that marketing business model research can significantly contribute to strategic management research in this area. The results also challenge the notion of silo-based development in business model literature, as all business model literature is based on shared intellectual foundations.

Finding the underlying structure of business model research

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.” (The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 2)

Through the Bibliographic Coupling Analysis, the researchers identified the research areas that structure the marketing business model research, divided into two streams with eight conversations and 22 research themes. The stream “Holistic Perspective on Business Models” includes the following groups:

• Business Model Dynamics: This group discusses the various processes outlining the lifecycle of a business model, such as evolution or internationalization.

• Societal Issues: This cluster focuses on the strategies that firms use to implement sustainable business models and includes sub-conversations about CSR and the impact of societal issues on business model innovations.

• Business Model and IoT: This group refers to emerging technologies such as Industry 4.0 and a servitized business model.

The second research stream, “downstream perspective on business models is composed of five clusters:

• Customers: In this group, research focuses on how customers can influence business models and how customer behaviour can be integrated into business models by looking at customer adoption or intention of use. This also provides valuable insights into new modes of consumption as promoted by the sharing economy. 

• Revenue Models: Muzellec and his colleagues identified three research themes here. One theme deals with the frameworks and tools that can improve revenue streams, like introducing freemium or subscription models. Another theme examines customer reactions to revenue model changes (free to fee-based) and the factors influencing consumers’ purchase decision-making in online-to-offline business models. The third theme focuses on industry-specific revenue models and the business model dynamics leading to adopting new revenue models. 

• Servitisation: This conversation assesses the challenges of service-related business models, such as product-service systems and solution- and service-based business models. It also examines the effect of servitisation on business model changes, for example, by analysing how service providers can improve manufacturer performance. Research in this domain also includes the impact of digital transformation and the relationship between servitisation and customer-oriented organisations. 

• Retail: The researchers have pinpointed articles and research streams that focus on retail innovation, mostly driven by digital technologies. These innovations are rooted in network redesign and how it affects business performance; relevant examples are service platforms, franchising models, omnichannel strategies and B2B relationships. 

• Market Configuration: In this cluster, Professor Muzellec and his fellow researchers grouped studies dealing with the external connections of a business model, such as platforms, supply chains, and networks. These relationships are also a way to innovate business models and structure the business environment.

As Maucuer et al. demonstrated, these findings highlight the importance of marketing research on business models for broader research, expanding its relevance beyond the strategic management field.

Marketing tools to further research on business models in modern times

“Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2)

Traditionally, strategy research on business models focuses on analysing value creation within the firm. Strategy assessing customer markets is a relatively new movement. However, it still takes a firm-centred perspective.  Marketing, on the other hand, perceives the customer as a central part of value creation.

In this context, consumer data is a valuable tool for conducting business model research. Customer data becomes a central part of a business’s value, as businesses need to understand their customers to gain a competitive advantage.

Researchers can assess business model performance using marketing metrics like customer satisfaction or NPS and examine business data-creation values while being aware of the ethical implications of using personal data.

Maucuer et al. suggest that future research could focus on contributions from other disciplines, such as information systems management or entrepreneurship.

Useful links:

• Link up with Prof. and Dean Laurent Muzellec on LinkedIn
• Read a related article: CMO confidence: How it helps the marketing budget healthy and long-term
• Discover Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin
• Apply for the Trinity MBA and EMBA.

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