Interfirm marketing alliance: understanding the influences of complementarity, compatibility, and combinative capacity on success

Firms seek interfirm marketing alliances as a source of critical information and resources in the development of new products and services, achieving and sustaining competitive advantage, and as a means of realising returns that would be unachievable operating individually. When these linkages are strategic and take the form of a highly collaborative alliance, firms are compelled to contribute firm specific assets, make alliance specific investments, and construct alliance specific governance in an effort to leverage each other and develop new alliance specific assets that may be used to establish and maintain competitive advantage. This article provides an alliance framework that helps to explicate the interactive relationships that occur in strategic marketing alliances. It further delineates the necessity for complementarity, compatibility, and combinative capacity in the context of assets, investments, and governance. Finally, it offers seven propositions in the context of market-based assets that demonstrate the framework's potential use in future empirical research.