Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
12
Collaboration marketing
Alan Fyall
Introduction
Although collaboration is often advanced as a new and innovative marketing approach for
organizations seeking to achieve competitive advantage, the wider management literature
suggests that collaboration has been omnipresent across many industries for many decades.
Initial studies by Emery and Trist (1965) set the early foundations for the study of collaboration
with contributions from Gray (1985, 1989), Waddock (1989), Terpstra and Simonin (1993),
Kanter (1995) and Palmer (1996) further developing the subject throughout the 1980s and
1990s. More recently, Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne (2002: 129) introduced the concept of
'network competition' where rewards go to those organizations that are able to best 'structure,
co-ordinate and manage relationships with their partners in a network committed to creating
customer and consumer value through collaboration'. This would certainly seem to be the case
for international airlines, the case focus of this chapter, although Selin (1993) is one of many who
argue that collaboration now represents a strategic necessity in tourism more broadly due to
the interdependencies of its predominantly large number of small actors and widespread
market fragmentation.
Despite the widespread adoption of collaborative strategies across many industries and sectors,
it is, thus, somewhat surprising that no generally accepted defi nition of collaboration exists. One
of the biggest hurdles for those attempting to defi ne collaboration is the multitude of similar, but
different, terms that on the surface appear to be used interchangeably. One interesting dimension
of collaboration is that there is a tendency for particular terms to be used in different contexts,
especially in tourism. For example, while the airline industry refers to collaboration as 'alliances'
(Morley 2003), hotels and restaurants prefer the term 'consortia' (Spyriadis and Fyall, 2003).
Public-sector organizations, attractions and destinations, meanwhile, appear to be more
comfortable with the term 'partnership' (Hill and Shaw 1995; Bramwell and Lane 2000;
Augustyn and Knowles 2000).
The defi nition that best underpins the above interpretations is that of Gray (1989) who
identifi ed fi ve key components of the collaboration process. To meet conditions of collabora-
tion, Gray (1989) argued that: stakeholders need to be independent; they need to assume joint
responsibility for the outcomes of collaboration; solutions will only be achieved through stake-
holders constructively dealing with differences; the ownership of decisions is shared; and that
