Co-management of purchasing and marketing: Why, when and how?

•We provide a new theoretical and conceptual foundation for the co-management of purchasing and marketing.•A novel typology based on resource dependence theory shows that different types of co-management need to be distinguished.•Co-management allows firms to deal with dependence on critical upstream and/or downstream resources.•The right co-management approach ultimately improves value creation within the supply chain.

This article discusses the theoretical and conceptual foundations for the co-management of purchasing and marketing and thereby provides some answers to the questions, why, when and how purchasing and marketing should be co-managed. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing between internal and external co-management of purchasing and marketing. Improving value creation and value capture is identified as a necessary “pull factor” driving the co-management of purchasing and marketing. Based on resource dependence theory (RDT), we argue that dependence on critical resources is another important “push factor” for the emergence of external co-management. We present a RDT-based typology of co-management constellations showing that co-management is not a one-size-fits-all approach and summarize our findings in five propositions on the co-management of purchasing and marketing. In sum, we conceptualize co-management of marketing and purchasing as a bridging strategy that allows a focal firm to accommodate dependence on critical upstream and/or downstream resources and improves value creation within the supply chain.