Defining business-to-consumer relationships: The consumer's perspective
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Patricia Sorce is associate professor of marketing at the College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA.
Kimberly Edwards is currently an MBA student at the College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA.
Abstract The purpose of this paper is to capture the consumer’s meaning of a relationship with a commercial firm. The unaided definitions of 167 adult consumers were coded using constructs based on service quality, social exchange and transactional exchange theories. The results revealed that service quality constructs were mentioned by 57 per cent of the respondents, social exchange constructs were mentioned by 41 per cent, and transactional exchange constructs by 25 per cent. The definitions used by many consumers were multi-dimensional and included a mix of constructs. The results confirm that while some business-to-business relationship constructs are appropriate for understanding the nature of the business-to-consumer relationship, service quality dimensions are central to the consumer’s definition of this relationship. The implications of this research reinforce the notion that the consumer’s relationship with a business is a means to an end, not the goal.
Dr Patricia Sorce College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623, USA. Tel: ⫹1 585 475 2313; Fax: ⫹1 585 475 5989; e-mail: [email protected]
INTRODUCTION The goal of many customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives is to build a relationship between a business and its customers. This will lead to improved retention rates, higher repeat purchase behaviour, lower propensity to switch and, ultimately, to higher profits.1 The promise of CRM, however, often falls short of expectations in practice. A more critical perspective on relationship marketing has emerged. As noted by Fournier et al., ‘the very things that marketers are doing to build relationships with customers are often the things that are destroying them’.2 CRM initiatives
䉷 Henry Stewart Publications 1741–2447 (2004) Vol. 11, 3, 255–267
will succeed if marketers build customer relationship strategies based on the benefits that customers seek from commercial relationships.3 The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers define the meaning of a relationship with a commercial firm. The paper first describes the basic concepts of relationship marketing that have emerged from the business-to-business (B2B) marketing world. The applicability of these models to business-to-consumer (B2C) interchanges is then examined. Finally, the research questions of the study are presented.
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Sorce and Edwards
Relationship marketing constructs The concept of relationship marketing migrated from organisational behaviour and industrial marketing, where interdependence between firms has been the foundation of successful B2B alliances. Morgan and Hunt defined relationship marketing as ‘all marketing activities directed towards establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exch
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