Abstract
As everybody knows, marketing is a science which studies how to deal with customers and partners in order to facilitate sales of goods or services. Currently, many people, especially consultants, stress on the marketing relationship between corporations and customers.
We can note that customer care has been the focus of business for many decades now. We may explore the development of relationship marketing since the 80s to understand how important relations are to business, and how one can work efficiently in a corporation. Firstly, we will focus on a definition of this new theory to understand what it involves.
Subsequently, we will be able to study the kind of relations established between consumers and companies, and what may be the links between communications and business. We could ask ourselves: what is the importance of relationships in establishing a marketing plan, or a business?
This expression is a concept which was originally described by Leonard Berry in 1983; he explained it as a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing. Relationship marketing is described as being oriented toward a long time horizon in contrast with the short-term orientation. The emphasis is placed on building long term relations with customers.
We could say that it is an alternative model which focuses on customers and relationships rather than on markets and products. Morgan and Hudt (1994) refer to it as all activities directed toward establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges. The other end of this new concept is customer retention, which is an attempt to reduce customer turnover and increase customer loyalty. The way to achieve this is to improve relations with consumers; by doing so, many companies discovered new ways of selling their products.
The first example is the relative importance of new loyalty programs, such as those in the distribution. In the past few years, we have seen the development of many loyalty cards such as Airlines cards, or membership rewards associated with one's credit card, or when you shop in a store, etc.
Tags: relationship marketing, Customer loyalty, Customer retention
