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Relationship marketing fo-
cused on building enduring
relations with key customers is here to stay. Organizations
are shedding their transactional mindset and are embracing relationship
marketing as a key strategy for sustaining growth and profitability.
Both customers and suppliers benefit from relationships that
are long-lasting. Apart from tangible benefits, such relationships help
both the sides gain a distinct competitive advantage and develop synergies
that cannot be easily acquired by competitors. Particularly in the B2B
context, mutually beneficial relationships, characterized by the
ingrained spirit of collaboration for developing customized solutions, assume
even more significance.
While ideally, relationships are between organizations,
sometimes relationships between the key employees of supplier and buyer
organizations at a personal level dominate the structural component of a
business relationship. This article examines the pros and cons of such
relationships and suggests strategies for supplier organizations to
insure themselves against the adverse effects of key employee turnover.
Relationships between organizations evolve at three different
levelseconomic, social and structural. While economic gains by both the
organizations is a good starting point for building enduring relationships,
over a period of time, social factors also come into play. After all, it is
the people who interact with each other, either individually or in groups,
on behalf of their respective organizations, thereby forging stronger
bonds between organizations. Socializing is, therefore, quite important for
organizations, as technology, systems and procedures cannot always act
as substitute for human beings. |
