The paper focuses on the relevance of the relationship between marketing and purchasing in companies acting in business-to-business markets. The paper develops an analysis of the business marketing and purchasing literature on the topic of the relationship between marketing and purchasing. It emerges how scarce attention has been addresses to this relationship within a general limited analysis of the intra-organizational issues in marketing and purchasing literature. The paper aims at clarifying some questions concerning the relationship between marketing and purchasing in business markets and providing an interpretative framework of such a relationship in business companies: Four macro typologies of the intra-organizational relationship between marketing and purchasing are proposed.