Small and Medium Enterprises’ marketing alliances: past research and future directions

Recently, strategic alliances have more and more drawn the attention of both the academic and industrial communities. Many streams of research have developed around this topic and some reviews of the body of literature have been done by different scholars, but they all refer to alliances in general, thus having a broad scope. In the last years, internationalization has become one of the most important focuses of firms, overall for SMEs, hence marketing alliances have started to gain acceptance and scholars to investigate them. However, a review of past research about this topic that outlines the main evidences, gaps and areas that need to be inquired has not been done yet. Consequently, this paper aims at carrying out a detailed analysis of the literature about marketing alliances, in order to organize the existing literature, synthetize research findings and suggest some interesting areas for future research