ABSTRACT
It is common practice among companies to engage various types of external marketing consultants from advertising, media, PR, DM, web, event, brand, marketing research and other marketing expertise agencies, even when they already have a marketing department led by a marketing manager. In 2001, there were about 43,000 such agencies in Sweden (Statistics Sweden, 2001). Wahlund, Rademaker, Nilsson & Svahn (2013) showed that the amount spent (real value) on some such services in Sweden almost tripled from the early 1990s to over ten billion SEK in 2010 (still not including all types of marketing expertise hired). In recent years, many new types of experts have appeared on the market following the IT development (Nilsson, Rademaker, Svahn & Wahlund, 2013). Research has shown that marketing managers often work with different external consultants simultaneously and that these managers often wish they could reduce the number of cooperating consultants or agencies. In addition, marketing managers also wish that agencies would cooperate better with each other and listen more to their clients, the marketing managers (Rademaker, 2013).
