Intergenerational development of marketing agility in B2B family businesses during turbulent times

Abstract

Family-owned B2B firms must navigate the dual challenge of cultivating long-term business relationships while rapidly adapting to market disruptions, particularly during generational transitions. Although marketing agility is crucial in dynamic business environments, little attention has been paid to its evolution across generations in family firms. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, we conduct a longitudinal multiple-case study of nine Croatian B2B family firms during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent crises. Based on 76 in-depth interviews and archival data covering the period from 2022 to 2024, we found that marketing agility emerges not as a standalone capability but rather as an outcome of the way founders' relational expertise and successors' digital and analytical capabilities are combined over time. We propose that such intergenerational integration is conceptualized as “layered marketing agility,” which explains how firms reconcile the need to maintain stable relationships with the need for rapid market adaptability. This research contributes to the marketing agility theory by situating it within dynamic capability processes and also extends family business research by explaining how intergenerational interaction acts as a source of adaptive advantage in turbulent B2B markets.