Co-marketing: state of the art and existing approaches. Insights from a literature review

Co-marketing strategies play an important role as they allow firms to gather an increased sense of relevance. This is particularly true nowadays, when firms have to deal with a scenario that has been radically changed by economic development and digital innovation. However, despite its diffusion, co-marketing remains a topic that is largely unsearched. In particular a comprehensive literature review on the topic that includes the most recent contributions is lacking, and this seems to be a mayor omission for the development of the studies. As for these premises, the purpose of the paper is to propose an analysis of existing contributions on co-marketing. In so doing a specific focus has been made on the different perspectives scholars have adopted in analyzing the topic. Five main approaches have been identified and their relations have been further investigated using the multidimensional scaling technique.