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Studies of the marketing processes employed by both industrial and
service firms seeking to optimize market performance have culminated in
the emergence of a new school of thought, collectively known as
`relationship marketing' (Chaston, 2000). The
primary focus of relationship marketing is towards building closer relationships with
customers as a strategy to overcome problems such
as acquiring global competitive advantage, coping with rapidly changing
technologies and reducing `time-to-market' of new products (Webster, 1992).
Customer relationships have been increasingly studied in academic
marketing literature (Dwyer et al., 1987; Morgan
and Hunt, 1994; Berry, 1995; and Sheth and Parvatiyar, 1995). A strong interest
on customer relationship is also apparent in marketing practices and this is most
evident in a firm's significant investment in Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) systems (Kerstetter, 2001; Winer, 2001; and Reinartz and Kumar 2002).
Despite the increased interest in relationship marketing, little research
has focused on the implementation of relationship marketing concepts (Sin et al., 2005). To help marketing practitioners
who seek to implement the concept of relationship marketing, few authors
have suggested behavioral dimensions of relationship marketing such as
trust, bonding, communication, shared values, empathy, commitment,
competence, reciprocity, etc. (Pressey and
Mathews, 2000; Jain et al., 2003; Ndubisi and
Wah, 2005; and Sin et al., 2005). This
means that the literature still lacks
contributions that describe relationship marketing
in practice. The question in the minds of marketing practitioners is regarding
the Relationship Marketing Instruments (RMIs) that are available that can be
used to manage and enhance customer relationships. Since the success of
customer relationship is largely dependent on practical or applied dimensions of
RMIs, this paper aims at determining and empirically testing the dimensions of
RMIs appropriate in managing customer relationships. |
