“Relationship marketing” or is it “relationships in marketing”? New opportunities and constraints

Citation

Ballantyne, D. (2009), "“Relationship marketing” or is it “relationships in marketing”? New opportunities and constraints", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 24 No. 5/6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2009.08024eaa.004

“Relationship marketing” or is it “relationships in marketing”? New opportunities and constraints

Article Type: Commentary From: Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Volume 24, Issue 5/6

Developing relationships in marketing, in the sense of establishing and maintaining useful social and business contacts with customers and suppliers, is as old as trade itself. Yet the stabilising yet sometimes disruptive impact of business relationships was pushed to the edge of marketing thought and practice in the technology enabled mass-marketing epoch that accompanied the post 2nd WW economic recovery. The renaissance in relationship thinking arguably began in the 1970s. It took hold rather slowly. However, it gained managerial prominence as a “relationship marketing” for services (Berry, 1983), and as a way of making a distinction between transactional and relationship orientations in business markets (Jackson, 1985). In the 1980s, interest in long-term interactive relationships gathered support, especially in the Scandinavian countries (Grönroos, 1983; Gummesson, 1987), and in USA where the underlying relational structure of channel intermediation became evident (for example, see Dwyer et al., 1987; Anderson and Narus, 1990). Yet alas, the significance of consumer and business relationships was still not recognized in major student marketing texts.

In the 1990s, relationship marketing came into its own as a rubric and as field of marketing inquiry. Some operational insights were absorbed from managing interaction episodes in services marketing, and from total quality management, and also a broader understanding of business interactions emerged from research projects conducted by the largely European-based Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) academic group. In the USA, Webster (1992) and Sheth and Parvatiyar (1995) contributed influential articles, among others. Also one-to-one relationship marketing opportunities were “rediscovered”. This was partly a consequence of new database information and communication technologies (ICT), which set a tsunami of technology-driven customer relationship management (CRM) activity in motion (see for example, Peppers and Rogers, 1993). Also new strategic frameworks were proposed for scoping out and assessing the stakeholder relationships of the firm (see for example, Christopher et al., 1991; Gummesson, 1999; Morgan and Hunt, 1994).

Ten years on and at the start of a new millennium, Möller and Halinen (2000) categorised and analysed the historical source inputs of the burgeoning relationship marketing domain. They saw four such source groups, namely: business marketing, services marketing, marketing channels, and database marketing/direct marketing, each with their own agendas and contestable relationship perspectives. The question is, does this matter? Especially insightful is the contribution of Egan (2003). He argues that relationship marketing today is divided, not so much by historical antecedents or industry groupings, but between those proponents who have a holistic view of markets and marketing with many interconnected and diverse organisational relationships, and those proponents who see relationship marketing as the one-to-one management of customer relationships. There is a world of difference (an ontological divide) between those who believe that relationships signal network interdependencies (and wish to describe the nature of what happens in complex markets) and those who believe that relationships can be managed unilaterally by one focal firm or another (and wish to develop normative rules for that).

Is it more useful to consider networks of relationships in marketing, rather than one-to-one relationships? I believe it now is. Global markets are systemically imploding and the long term consequences of this are as yet unknown and probably unknowable, except to say that a broader macro-view of relationship marketing is now of highest priority. Clearly the marketing discipline is undergoing another challenge that goes to the very foundations of the discipline and what is meant by exchanges of value. Meanwhile, the 4Ps continue to constrain our teaching. Our students will not thank us for its persistent use in new and emerging market relationships.

With these concerns in mind I commend this special issue to you. The articles contained within started as conference papers at the 2007 Relationship Marketing Summit in Buenos Aries, Argentina. This event has an important history as part of an ongoing challenge to mainstream marketing orthodoxy. This particular challenge began with the Research Conference on Relationship Marketing in 1992, held under the auspices of the American Marketing Association’s RM-SIG and hosted by Jag Sheth and Atul Parvatiyar at Emory University in Atlanta Georgia, USA. In the next year, at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, I established the International Colloquium in Relationship Marketing (ICRM). This has been held every year since at a different host University. Both these research based events continue to this day on the International academic calendar but in December, 2007 they joined up as the Relationship Marketing Summit, thanks to the inspiration and determination of Professor Jaquie Pels at Universidad di Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aries.

David BallantyneDepartment of Marketing, University of Otago, New Zealand

Corresponding author

David Ballantyne can be contacted at: dballantyne@business.otago.ac.nz