Dark Side of Relationship Marketing
Dark Side of Relationship Marketing
Dark Side of Relationship Marketing
D. Ramkumar*
S. Saravanan**
Relationship Marketing Paradigm
Relationship marketing is the new paradigm in marketing literature (Kotler, 1991, Grnroos,
C.1994, Gummesson, 1997, and Brodie et al., 1997) that challenges the existing and entrenched
philosophies in marketing literature. Relationship marketing has created lot of interest among
academics and practitioners.
Relationship marketing is the newest school of marketing thought. The on going interest in
Relationship marketing through the nineties and in the new millennium is evident from the
number of conferences organised on the topic, number of business schools offering course on
relationship marketing and number of articles published in journals. In fact no other marketing
topic has been written about as much during the 1990s (Mowen and Minor, 1998).
Relationship Marketing is a strategy used to learn more about customers mood and behaviours in
order to develop stronger relationship with them. The new paradigm asserts that intelligent
marketers should view existing customers as a tremendous growth opportunity (Cindy Claycomb
and Charles L. Martin 2002).It can be used to build a loyal customer base and as a result the
brands marketed by the company will grow in strength by leaps and bounds
For academicians it is a paradigm shift in marketing philosophy urging the importance of long
term relationship and retaining existing customers over getting new customers; since a bird in
hand is better than the two in a bush. For practitioners Relationship marketing is a competitive
advantage (Day, 2000), a tool to reduce the customer churn (Schneider and Bowen, 1999), a tool
to overcome service failures (Crosby and Stephens, 1987), an opportunity for marketing
additional products and services to a more receptive customer base (Priluck, 2003)
Evolution of Relationship Marketing
In 1983 Leonard L. Berry, distinguished professor of Marketing at Texas A&M University,
coined the word Relationship Marketing when he presented a paper entitled Relationship
Marketing at the American Marketing Associations Services Marketing Conference. The paper
was published in the conference proceedings and for the first time the phrase Relationship
Marketing appeared in the Marketing literature. Later Jackson (1985) used the concept in
Business to Business context.
Another opinion is that Relationship marketing is a gradual extension of the Nordic School
approach to services marketing and management (Gummesson, 1997). There are ample examples
to prove that long-term relationship emphasized by the Nordic School researchers (Grnroos,
2000) but without using the term Relationship marketing as early as 1977, before Berry and Bund
Jackson used the term relationship marketing.
New old concept
The idea of developing and fostering relationship with customers is not something revolutionarily
new, but many firms are realizing the significance of relationship marketing for the first time.
This phenomenon is as old as the history of trade and commerce (Grnroos, C.2004). So, we can
say that it is a new-old concept (Berry 1995). While relationship has been rediscovered in the
western world, they have remained a fundamental part of exchanges in many eastern cultures
(Ohmae, 1989 and Rich 2000). Now many firms discover relationship marketing for the first
time, this is because many larger firms lost sight of the individual customer, believing that it was
more efficient to market to them on mass scale (Grossman 1998)
*Department of Management Studies, N.M.S.S. Vellaichamy Nadar College, Madurai. E-mail: ramkumar_madurai@yahoo.com
**Department of Management Studies, S.R.M. Easwari Engineering College, Chennai
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