Relationships Marketing, as a New Direction of a Marketing Theory (original) (raw)

The interest in relationships marketing has grown in recent years and is now beginning to take center stage in marketing thought and research. Relationships marketing covers the whole spectrum of marketing's sub-disciplines and also integrates concepts and theoretical paradigms from several social science disciplines, including economics, sociology, psychology and political science. The full potential of relationships marketing has implications for organizational changes and for creating superior marketing value. Several indications suggest that it will have a broad appeal and would encourage widespread academic inquiry. The aim of this article would be to present various points of view to relationships marketing and highlight concepts which, according to authors point of view, carry out the highest level of relationships marketing correlation with classical marketing theory and which are the most important to present practical marketing activity, to marketing management and marketing research. Relationships marketing definition Relationship marketing is the practice of building long-term satisfying relationships with key parties: customers, suppliers, distributors-in order to retain their long-term preference and business. Smart marketers try to build long-term, trnsting, "willwin" relationships with valued customers, distributors, dealers and suppliers. They accomplish this by promising and delivering high quality, good service and fair prices to the other parties over time. Relationship marketing results in strong economic, technical and social ties among the parties. It also cuts down on transaction costs and time. The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is the building of a unique company asset 68 called a marketing network. A marketing network consists of the company and all of its supporting stakeholders: customer, employee, suppliers, distributors, retailers, ad agencies, university scientists, and others with whom it has built mutually profitable business relationships. Increasingly, competition is not between companies, but between whole networks, with the prize going to the company that has built the better network. (Kotler, 1997, p.12-13). These paragraphs from the leading American textbook on marketing provide arguments, that relationship marketing has "arrived" in marketing theory and practice. Kotler includes relationships and networks as one of the seven