Relationship Marketing - A Paradigm Shift In Marketing Thought?

12 Pages 2993 Words

an important competitive advantage. Homogenous services, such as banking and telecommunications, no longer concentrated solely on winning customers. The onus shifted to seek ways of keeping their customers happy and facilitate further use of their services. If relationships are seen as the main asset of a business, then all its efforts should be geared toward building them. By collecting information through relationship marketing, businesses were able to better target what they sold, thereby providing a better service and increasing the opportunity to create enduring relationships with their customers.

Many businesses in the past focused upon selling their product or service and the customer was seen to have little or no direct association with the company’s operation. The importance of the customer clearly emerged as firms adopted strategies conceived within the concept of market orientation (Kandampully, 1999). Peter Drucker (1973) stressed the importance of customer driven strategies to the success of businesses in his statement ‘ to...