Relationship marketing is a new paradigm that challenges the existing and entrenched philosophies in marketing literature. Relationship marketing has created a lot of interest among academics and practitioners. Although this phenomenon is as old as the history of trade and commerce, the term, "relationship marketing" was coind by Leonardo L Beery only two decades ago, in 1983. Firms are realizing the significance of developing and fostering sustained relationship with customers. This article explores the past, present and future of "relationship marketing".
The
birth of trade has disappeared in the mist of time, but the archeological evidence
of trading goes back more than 10,000 years (Dixon et al., 1968). Marketing
practices can be traced back as far as 7000 BC (Carratu, 1987). So, marketing
has been existing, since the dawn of commerce, even though it was not called so
but the practice of marketing is quite ancient. Only the formal study of the subject
is of recent origin. Marketing as a subject has been taught at the university
level for nearly 100 years.
Hagerty
(1936), while writing an essay in the first volume of the Journal of Marketing,
identified many of the earliest American universities to offer marketing courses,
including the University of Illinois (1902), New York University (1902), the Ohio
State University (1905), the University of Pittsburgh (1909) and the Harvard Business
School (1908).
Marketing
evolved as a separate discipline from economics, around the beginning of 20th century (Sheth J N and Parvatiyar, 2000 and Bartels, 1988). Several early publication
of American Economic Association were analyzed and articles were identified dealing
with marketing practices as early as in 1894. The modern era of marketing began
in 1957, with the publication of Wroe Alderson's book Marketing Behavior and
Executive Action. |
