“Partnership is fashionable. And writing about partnership is certainly fashionable.” This is more or less how many studies on partnership begin. Why did I succumb to this fashion?
Who is a partner?
In everyday life, if we are lucky and capable of helping it, we find partners in our personal lives, partners at work, and increasingly often, we find partners in business. Why is luck needed for this? Because we generally have positive associations with the term partner (just as we do with luck). Due to the numerous contexts in which it appears, the word partner can successfully compete even with the term sponsor; we begin to wonder what it actually means.
Let us try to refer to the “Dictionary of the Polish Language”, according to which a partner is:
1) a participant in a game, play, conversation, a companion, an associate, a life partner, a spouse;
2) an artist, an actor performing with someone;
3) partnership, participating in something, being a partner; cooperation based on partnership.
Partner as an associate
The dictionary definition generally justifies the widespread use of the term partner / partnership. It also allows us to understand why it is partners who sign off on audit reports commissioned to auditing firms, or legal opinions prepared by law firms. A few years ago, the terms partner / partners were used by world-renowned firms; today, the use of these terms both in company names and as a title seems to be a characteristic feature of all firms in the legal and auditing services sector. This phenomenon, which often causes surprise and is treated (rightly so, to a large extent) as a marketing ploy, is fully understandable to lawyers; citing Prof. Całus, “in the view of English law and the laws of US states, the basic legal form of companies is a partnership. Partnership means the relations existing between persons who carry on a business in common as co-owners with a view to profit. Business is understood as any trade, occupation, or profession” [1]. Thus, in this sense, a partner is simply an associate. However, using the term partner has an emotional connotation of a decidedly positive nature.
Partner as a participant in market relations
The concept of partnership appears more and more frequently in the context of relations between market participants, and this is not about a partner in the sense of a contract party or an associate [3]. Macneil, distinguishing between market transactional exchange and relational exchange, emphasizes that in the case of a buy-sell transaction, one can describe the entire transaction cycle starting with the transaction preparation phase and ending with its settlement, whereas in the case of an exchange leading to cooperation, we are dealing with a dynamic state “no part of which can be meaningfully viewed independently of other parts” [2]. Very often, a long horizon of cooperation is associated with (or is even possible thanks to) investments in the customer.
Regardless of whether we are dealing with a market sales transaction or a market trade relationship, there are always two sides; one interested in buying, and the other in selling. Let us therefore look at the issues of partnership from two perspectives: the seller’s perspective, using marketing theory, and the buyer’s perspective, reaching into the theory of purchasing management and logistics management.
The seller’s point of view
The concept of building closer relationships between suppliers and recipients was first used in industrial goods marketing. Partnership in seller-buyer relations is mentioned as one of the possible and increasingly desirable relationships between market participants. M. Hutt and Th. W. Speh place these relationships between two extreme poles: from pure transactional relations, through repeated transactions, long-term ties, buyer-seller partnership, to strategic alliances constituting the pole of pure cooperation relations [4].
Today, marketing pays more and more attention to cultivating long-term, beneficial relationships with customers, which is reflected in the emergence of a new, as some claim, marketing concept, namely relationship marketing, also often called partnership marketing.
According to J. Otto, the author of an extensive monograph on relationship marketing, “improving the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing activities carried out by modern enterprises in an increasingly competitive market requires their radical verification and the enrichment of the classic 4P concept with activities creating the building and maintenance of long-term and profitable relationships with a selected group of potentially most valuable customers [5].