Reflections on the 1st Relationship Marketing Summit

Citation

Sheth, J.N. (2009), "Reflections on the 1st Relationship Marketing Summit", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 24 No. 5/6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2009.08024eaa.003

Reflections on the 1st Relationship Marketing Summit

Article Type: Commentary From: Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Volume 24, Issue 5/6

The impact of relationship marketing in B to B markets is nothing short of spectacular. In less than three decades, it has taken the center stage of B to B marketing both in practice and in theory.

Relationship marketing grew out of the dissatisfaction of traditional consumer goods centric marketing management especially among marketing scholars interested in industrial and services marketing. While several scholars in the early seventies articulated the uniqueness of industrial buying behaviour, it was the establishment of Malcolm Baldrige Award for Quality that led to focusing on customer satisfaction and customer relationship management, especially in industrial markets. In many ways, it was a revolt against the dominant paradigm of aggregate market share and profitability promulgated by PIMS studies on managerial marketing.

More importantly, like all reforms, relationship marketing emerged at grassroots level in Northern Europe, Australia and America. Not surprisingly, the Northern Europeans and especially the Nordic scholars were the first to focus on understanding and modelling Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) using clinical methods and case studies. This is understandable because of greater concentration of the industrial and services sectors in their economies.

So was the case with the Australian and the British scholars. Finally, American scholars also began to focus on relationship marketing especially in the growing services sector including banking, telephone and utility services. Since they all had direct relationships with end users, it was easy to have access to revenue data at the individual customer or account level. The growth of CRM systems which encouraged companies to automate and integrate different customer databases, allowed many scholars to engage in data mining and analytics to gain customer insights.

Each of the three schools of relationship marketing evolved independently and in parallel with their own unique concepts, methodology and empirical findings. While there were some boundary level interactions, all three of them were pretty much insulated from one another.

This led to the obvious necessity of organizing the 1st Relationship Marketing Summit in Argentina, under the able leadership of Professor Jaqueline Pels. As expected, the conference was a great success with scholars from all over the world sharing ideas and traditions unique to each school of thought.

I had the privilege to attend the conference. Not only did I learn a lot in three days, but it was equally satisfying to see mutual respect and eagerness to share among scholars from all different traditions of relationship marketing. It was equally satisfying to see younger scholars challenging more established scholars and contributing their own perspectives and experiences.

Relationship marketing transformed industrial selling from territorially defined, quota driven sales culture to organizing global key account management with cross functional teams focused on individual customers. It shifted marketing metrics to share of wallet with cross sell/up sell reward system, and customer retention strategies. However, I believe relationship marketing now needs to move beyond the share of wallet thinking. What we need is an understanding of what I call a “joint venture” relationship between a customer and a supplier where both parties contribute resources and co-create value in addition to exchange of value.

Jagdish N. ShethEmory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA