As everybody knows, marketing is a science which studies how to deal with customers and partners in order to facilitate sales of goods or services. Currently, many people, especially consultants, stress on the marketing relationship between corporations and customers.
We can note that customer care has been the focus of business for many decades now. We may explore the development of relationship marketing since the 80s to understand how important relations are to business, and how one can work efficiently in a corporation. Firstly, we will focus on a definition of this new theory to understand what it involves.
Subsequently, we will be able to study the kind of relations established between consumers and companies, and what may be the links between communications and business. We could ask ourselves: what is the importance of relationships in establishing a marketing plan, or a business?
This expression is a concept which was originally described by Leonard Berry in 1983; he explained it as a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing. Relationship marketing is described as being oriented toward a long time horizon in contrast with the short-term orientation. The emphasis is placed on building long term relations with customers.
We could say that it is an alternative model which focuses on customers and relationships rather than on markets and products. Morgan and Hudt (1994) refer to it as all activities directed toward establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges. The other end of this new concept is customer retention, which is an attempt to reduce customer turnover and increase customer loyalty. The way to achieve this is to improve relations with consumers; by doing so, many companies discovered new ways of selling their products.
The first example is the relative importance of new loyalty programs, such as those in the distribution. In the past few years, we have seen the development of many loyalty cards such as Airlines cards, or membership rewards associated with one's credit card, or when you shop in a store, etc.
Tags: relationship marketing, Customer loyalty, Customer retention
[...] This is the extent of what we initially said about relationship marketing, because this concept asks for more relations between departments in enterprises. The global idea is that more the communication between staff members is developed in a business, the higher will be the results. We could also extend the value of the previous remarks to the relationship between the firm and the customer. In fact, it is also important to consider that every kind of exchange in our society has been a “temporary” link or contract between the dealer and the customer. [...]
[...] Companies must also make efforts to change their way of doing business if they want to correspond to these new criteria. Martin Christopher, Adrian Paycustone, and David Ballantyne (1991) at the Cranfield Graduate School of Management claim that relationship marketing has the potential to forge a new synthesis between quality management, customer service relation, and marketing. This seems to be favorable for firms owing to the extent of relations between services; the results may be an increase of efficiency and more profitability. Finally, the benefits of better relations with customers and a customer retention program will be high. [...]
[...] So, the capacity of doing business is partly connected to the ability to create a good climate of relation with the actors involved. We observed the development of business as part of the growing complexity of our society. The changes were enormous between a society of production, where the demand is higher than the production, and a society of markets, where the suppliers don't find enough demand for their goods. But, one common thing is that during this change of habits, one aspect has remained the same: the communication. [...]
[...] For many decades, they have tried to maintain the best relationship with them as it is a matter of competition and life. If a store wants to vie with competitors and wants to stay open on a long term basis, the staff must realize the crucial element of what a consumer wants when he enters. To begin with, the organization must remain close to its consumers in the long term as well as in the short run. This means that the staff should be helpful, and be aware of customer reactions; and also the language which will permit us to engage in that kind of relation. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
