4. A research agenda
In this paper, we have illustrated the existence of many tasks in customer relationship management and we have shown that these tasks need to be performed simultaneously, leading to a need to manage multiplexity. While many, if not all, of the 36 tasks have been researched in business markets, most of those studies focus on a single task or small sets of tasks. As such, they fail to capture the existence of multiplexity in its totality. In other words, we lack studies that cover many tasks, and analyze their coexistence and mutual interdependence.
While we focused exclusively on customer relationship management to illustrate our arguments, the concept of multidexterity should also be considered in other areas of business marketing. For example, the distinction between market taking and market making (market shaping), and the distinction between market driven and market driving offers starting points for interesting discussions of marketing management. The STP framework (segmentation-targeting-positioning) highlights three different tasks that must be handled for successful market management. Möller and Halinen (1999) suggest four levels of management in business markets. Therewith, there is a need to identify the different tasks involved in business marketing and to draw the multiplex landscape of marketing at different analytical levels.
As discussed above, our knowledge about the usefulness and appropriate application of management mechanisms for ambidexterity is limited. We need a better understanding of how firms can optimize their multidexterity capabilities in order to drive performance. Comparisons of different structural, temporal, and task-separation options in case studies and quantitative analyses as well as studies of transitions (e.g., the introduction of co-location or the movement of workspaces in organizations) would be helpful for developing managerial guidelines. Likewise, insights into the design of successful contextual enabling of multiplexity in business marketing could improve practice. In particular, studies of incentive systems and monitoring performance would be instrumental in deriving concrete knowledge about practical implementations. In terms of contextual separation, studies of how salespeople adapt to the context (e.g., Spiro and Weitz, 1990; Weitz, 1980; Weitz, Sujan, and Sujan, 1986) provide a good starting point for further research.
