Sensemaking About Business-to-Business Strategies and Strategies Relationships and Relationships: A Commentary on Reid and Plank’s Review. Retrospection is one of the properties of sensemaking. Retrospection happens implicitly, as unintended thinking, or explicitly, in the form of active thinking. | Sensemaking AboutBusiness-to-BiLisiness Strategiesand Relationships A Commentary on Reid and Plank s Review Arch G. Woodside Retrospection is one of the properties of sensemaking. Retrospection happens implicitly as unintended thinking or explicitly in the form of active thinking. Focusing active thinking to retrospect about what we really know and do not know about business-to-business marketing helps to identify small subtle features and relationships that can have surprisingly large effects as noted by Weick 1995 p. 52 and found by Hall and Menzies 1983 and Hall 1984 1999 . Reid and Plank s review serves well in forcing active thinking about what we really know and do not know about business-to-business strategies and relationships. While not deep their coverage of relevant literature from 1978 through 1997 is broad and useful for developing a sensemaking perspective. This commentary focuses on two issues. First what are the main contributions of Reid and Plank s review Second what needs more emphasis in the review or is left out of the review that needs our attention THE MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS OF REID AND PLANK S REVIEW Reid and Plank s hereafter R P review is valuable reading particularly for 1 identifying and indexing twenty years on literature on business-to-business marketing and 2 describing research shortages and surpluses in business-to-business marketing topics. Agreeing with Schank s 1990 proposal that data finding data manipulation 243 244 FUNDAMENTALS OF BUSINESS MARKETING RESEARCH and comprehension are three principal dimensions of intelligence R P s review helps to improve our search techniques and ability to label and mentally index while reading business-to-business marketing scientific reports. Regarding finding data stored in our memories Schank 1990 p. 224 advocates Higher intelligence depends upon complex perception and labeling. R P s review helps to increase the reader s ability to see the complexity of the business-to-business marketing .
