Introduction to the Imm Special Issue on ‘Project Marketing and the Marketing of Solutions’ a Comprehensive Approach to Project Marketing and the Marketing of Solutions

Introduction to the IMM special issue on ‘Project marketing
and the marketing of solutions’ A comprehensive approach
to project marketing and the marketing of solutions
Bernard Cova a, Robert Salle b,⁎
a Euromed Marseille, Marketing Department, BP 921, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
b E.M.LYON, Marketing Department, 23, Av Guy de Collongue, BP 174, 69132 Lyon Ecully Cedex, France
Accepted 2 April 2006
Available online 11 October 2006
Abstract
This introduction to the special issue on ‘Project Marketing and the Marketing of Solutions’ starts by highlighting the major contributions made
in the field of project marketing during the last decade. Then it points out the emergence of integrated solutions and details the major challenges
facing the marketing of solutions. It concludes on the possible synergies between the marketing of solutions and project marketing.
© 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Anticipation; Bidding; Integration; Interaction; Non-business actors; Project phases
1. Introduction
For a long time industrial marketing has been established as a
discipline outside the marketing of consumer goods. Since the
1970s, research carried out on either side of the Atlantic has
made considerable contributions to the developments of theoretical
and practical knowledge. However, at the onset of the
1990s, there was still little exploration in one sub-field of
industrial marketing: that of the marketing of firms selling
projects to order and most often in reply to a customer's call for
bidding. Researchers in marketing had apparently abandoned
this sub-field on one hand to economists, who put forward a
multitude of probabilistic models or models deriving from the
game theory which aim is to fix the optimal price in reply to the
bid to tender (Rothkopf & Stark, 1979), and on the other hand to
specialists in negotiations, notably in international negotiation
(Ghauri, 1986). This can be explained by the fact that in... [continues]

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