Drivers and Barriers of Cross-buying in B2B Digital Marketing Services

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to identify and verify determinants that influence a digital marketing agency’s clients’ cross-buying intentions. Specifically, it is a case study that explores and identifies determinants that influence the client’s cross-buying intentions when they are offered to cross-buy the digital marketing agency’s newly introduced creative service. Furthermore, the determinants are further validated and categorized into barriers and enablers that influence the clients’ cross-buying intentions of the newly introduced creative service. The new creative service is a service that consists of developing creative content and creative branding concepts that can be used in digital platforms that the marketing agency’s clients are present on. The idea behind implementing the creative service is for the case company to be able to offer a complete digital marketing service solution.
By interviewing experts both in the digital marketing field and within sales and the creative agency field, relevant determinants are identified. The determinants that are identified are payment equity, switching cost, sales expertise, trust, and perceived value. By applying conceptual theories and insights regarding the determinants and by using secondary data (data concerning relationship length and depth) from the case company’s CRM system, a questionnaire was created that was sent out to the case company’s clients. Based on the results of the questionnaire, regression models were run and the output of the regressions was analyzed and discussed in relation to the experts’ perspectives and the academic literature. The findings indicate that the strongest driver is switching costs. Other identified drivers are relationship length and one variable within payment equity. The identified barriers were perceived value, sales expertise, and one variable within payment equity. Trust was not considered due to inaccurate results and relationship depth (retainer size) was perfectly independent to cross-buying the creative services.
Based on the results relevant suggestions for the case company are discussed.