An issue perhaps less well acknowledged is the central role that relationship marketing played
in paving the way to a networked view of value creation (see Morgan and Hunt, 1994), along
with the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group (Håkansson and Snehota, 1989).
Today, marketing acknowledges more than ever the existence of multiple relationships and
networks of relationships between different actors (Gummesson, 2008; Ford et al., 2011;
Lusch and Vargo, 2014; Maglio and Spohrer, 2008). This shift to the networked economy is
partially due to new technologies, partially to the broader view on the phenomenon of
relationships. Although also previous research has acknowledged the existence of
relationships between customers (Baron and Harris, 2010; Martin and Pranter, 1989; Pitta and
Fowler, 2005), among multiple stakeholders (Gummesson, 2008; Payne, Ballantyne and
Christopher, 2005) and with objects such as brands (Fournier, 1998), technology has brought
about new types of relationships that exist between things (e.g. the internet of things), and
between humans and digital devices (e.g. cognitive computing such as IBM’s Watson
ecosystem).