Marketing has made a paradigm shift from transactional approach to relational approach. We are living in a globalized world, where competition has become an unavoidable element of business and customers have become scarce. This has led to a situation where all the firms in the same industry are trying to attract the same customers in various ways, even while offering similar products and services. They are using relationship marketing approach to ensure that the customers remain loyal and come back to them for the same products and services. This study aims to understand the impact of relationship marketing on customer loyalty. It also discusses the impact of various demographic variables like gender, income and education, in association with marketing variables, on customer loyalty.

Over the last two and a half decades, marketing has witnessed a paradigm shift. The literature reveals that marketing has shifted from "transaction marketing to relationship marketing" (Lindgreen, 2001). Scholars have identified the need to retain customers to have a competitive advantage in the market. The challenge for a firm is to attract and retain loyal customers. Previous research has shown that attracting new customer is costlier than serving an existing customer. It is claimed by Reichheld and Sasser (1990) that a 5 percent improvement in customer retention can cause an increase in profitability between 25 percent and 85 percent (in terms of net present value) depending upon the industry. Relationship marketing aims at building and maintaining long-term relationship with customers. A firm can exploit customer relationship to have information regarding customers' needs and wants so that a suitable strategy can be designed to serve the customers more efficiently and effectively than the competitors. Rapp and Collins (1990) argue that customer relationship building certainly has mutual rewards that benefit both the firm as well as the customer. This is the reason why firms are always interested in knowing the satisfaction level of customers. Very often firms are using relationship marketing as a marketing tool to retain their customers for long. In this context, it is very important to empirically investigate the impact of relationship marketing on customer loyalty, so that organizations can use this type of information at the time of designing a relationship marketing strategy in order to gain a high level of loyalty among their customers. This study aims to understand the impact of relationship marketing on customer loyalty. At the same time, this study also aims to investigate the impact of various demographic variables like gender, income and education, in association with relationship marketing variables, on customer loyalty.

Customer loyalty and customer retention are the most important challenges faced by most of the Chief Executive Officers across the world (Ball, 2002). At the same time, it is also found that effective relationship marketing strategy helps the organization to understand customers' needs, so that organizations can serve their customers better than their competitors, which finally leads to cost reduction and customer loyalty (Ndubisi, 2004). The focus of this study is to empirically investigate the impact of relationship marketing variables on customer loyalty. The impact of different demographical variables are also taken into consideration while examining the relationship between relationship marketing and customer loyalty. This study certainly strengthens the existing body of knowledge by providing some empirically tested insight in the Indian context.

Relationship Marketing Strategy, Customer Loyalty, Products and Services, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin, KMO, Loyalty Based Management, Harvard Business Review, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, Qualitative Market Research, Multiple Regression Analysis.