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The results of a systematic literature review in marketing and sales literature are presented. As with the social psychology systematic literature review, planning and selection are expounded, and a descriptive analysis of the literature is given.

Then, an overview of current thinking on buyer-seller similarity is provided.

2.4.1 Review procedure Planning

The aim of this systematic literature review is to provide an overview of research and opinion regarding buyer-seller similarity and its impact on dependent variables that are relevant in sales, in order to compare the outcomes with the systematic literature review in social psychology.

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For this review, mainly EBSCO Business Source Complete and Science Direct were used to retrieve the articles, found in an initial search, using Google Scholar.

Articles that were irretrievable through EBSCO Business Source Complete or Science Direct, were acquired through the library services of HZ University of Applied Sciences, and the databases of the Dutch Open University.

Selection

The list of Marketing-related journals of the ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide is used as a quality inclusion or exclusion criterion. Even though similarity is given substantial research attention in Marketing, the number of studies is considerably smaller than in social psychology. The inclusion relevance criterion consisted of two phases: first identifying all articles that contained the term “perceived similarity”, then excluding all articles that are not situated in the context of buyer-seller relationships. In the first phase 201 grade four articles; 130 grade three articles; 132 grade two articles; and 20 grade one articles. Lastly, ABS unlisted articles are added, based on citing within the subset of included articles.

Examples of other streams of research in marketing that utilise the similarity construct are perceived similarity of products, services, and brands (Balasubramanian and Cole, 2002; Biswas et al., 2014); brand extensions (Aaker and Keller, 1990; Swaminathan et al., 2001); online recommendations and source credibility (Cooke et al., 2002; Ludwig et al., 2013), specifically the role of endorsers (Ohanian, 1990; Chou, 2014); similarity of choices (Zemack-Rugar et al., 2012); company similarity as perceived by customer (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003; Press and Arnould, 2011) similarities between salespeople and sales managers (DelVecchio, 1998); goal similarity (Gao and Shi, 2011); and surface similarity of customers as a criterion for segmentation (Weitz et al., 1986).

When papers that do not focus on buyer-seller similarity are excluded, fifty-nine articles remain. Furthermore, three often-cited articles that were published in journals, that are not itemised in the ABS Marketing list, are added (Evans, 1963;

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Tosi, 1966; Davis and Silk, 1972). In total sixty-two articles are used to depict current marketing thinking on buyer-seller similarity.

Table 3: Distribution of included marketing articles per ABS listed journal

Journal

No. of articles

ABS Grade

Industrial Marketing Management 13 3

Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management 11 2

Journal of Marketing 9 4

Journal of Marketing Research 5 4

Psychology & Marketing 4 3

Journal of Retailing 3 4

Advances in Consumer Research 2 2

Journal of International Marketing 2 3

Journal of Marketing Management 2 3

Journal of Services Marketing 2 2

American Behavioral Scientist 1 n/a

European Journal of Marketing 1 3

Int. Review of Retail, Distribution & Consumer Research 1 1

Journal of Business 1 n/a

Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing 1 2

Journal of Business Research 1 3

Journal of Consumer Research 1 4

Marketing Letters 1 3

Sloan Management Review 1 n/a

As in the social psychology literature review, QDA Miner lite is utilised during extraction.

2.4.2 Descriptive analysis

The earliest article included in this review is the seminal paper by Evans (1963), the most current articles are from 2014 (Arndt et al., 2014; Dowell et al., 2014).

During the end of the last century, a peak in research is notable. Publications in

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the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and Industrial Marketing Management, which are both sales oriented journals, account for this peak.

Together these journals account for twenty-five of the sixty-two articles. The Journal of Marketing is the third largest contributor (nine articles). The articles on buyer-seller similarity in the Journal of Marketing are more evenly spread over time. Apart from this peak from 1995 to 1999, an increasing number of publications is notable. The articles of this review are marked in the references.

Figure 3: Distribution of included marketing articles per five-year period

When looking at research quality by means of ABS list ranking, most articles are shown to be of grade three quality. Grade four and grade two publications are approximately evenly represented. The lowest grade journals only account for one publication (Gaur et al., 2012). As the number of journals lessens per quality category, a reverse pattern would emerge when every journal pays equal attention to the subject of buyer-seller similarity. As this is not the case, it is concluded that buyer-similarity is specifically addressed in high quality marketing journals.

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

-1969 1970 - 1974 1975 - 1979 1980 - 1984 1985 - 1989 1990 - 1994 1995 - 1999 2000 - 2004 2005 - 2009 2010 - 2014

Number of articles per 5 year period

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Figure 4: Distribution of marketing articles per ABS Quality Grade (59 ABS ranked articles)

The set of sixty-two reviewed articles comprises sixteen conceptual papers; three literature reviews (Schwepker Jr, 2003; Herbst et al., 2011; Mortensen, 2012);

three meta-analyses (Swan et al., 1999; Palmatier et al., 2006; Wood, Boles, Babin, et al., 2008); and forty empirical studies. Of the empirical studies, two studies have a qualitative approach (Gremler and Gwinner, 2008; Patwardhan et al., 2009).

The samples in the empirical studies vary. For instance samples of business to business salespeople (Strutton et al., 1996), dyads in retail (Woodside and Davenport, 1974); and dyads of life insurance salespeople and married couples (Arndt et al., 2014) are used. The number of studies using students as a unit of observation is small (Busch and Wilson, 1976; Jones et al., 1998; Peterson and Limbu, 2009; Jiang et al., 2010) and even criticised (Campbell et al., 1988). The most employed research methods are self-report surveys and experiments.