Relationship Marketing : Winning and Keeping Customers (CIM Professional Development S.)

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Summary: Distillation of the Best Writings on Relationship Marketing
Review: The 21 articles in Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage are wide-ranging, covering manufacturing and services, business and consumer database marketing, and retail. All in all, they represent some of the best writing on relationship marketing including seminal works by marketing experts from around the world such as Theodore Levitt, Leonard Berry, David Maister and Christian Grönroos.

The fundamental principle upon which relationship marketing is founded is that the greater the level of customer satisfaction with the relationship with the supplier-not just the product or service-then the greater the likelihood that the customer will stay with the supplier. Retaining customers is important, as there is strong evidence to suggest that customer retention is directly related to profitability. It appears that the longer the customer stays with a supplier, the higher the likelihood that they will place a greater amount of business with the supplier, even to the extent of single sourcing. Further, there is a likelihood that these retained customers will cost less to service and that they will be less likely to be motivated solely by price.

At the heart of relationship marketing is the integration, company-wide, of hitherto separate customer service and total quality initiatives with the mainstream of marketing strategy. Conventionally, customer service and quality have been managed separately from marketing. In the relationship marketing paradigm, they are intertwined and managed as one. The rationale behind this is that it is upon service and quality that relationships are built.

Edited by academics from the Cranfield School of Management, the articles in this book are supplemented with summaries and commentaries, highlighting a broad scope of issues such as customer retention, employee satisfaction, supplier relations and the management of service quality. These issues are brought together to provide an integrated approach to the development of a relationship marketing strategy. This book of linked readings has been designed to reinforce themes first developed in Relationship Marketing by Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1991) and provides a solid basis for the further development of relationship marketing as a discipline and as a practical orientation.

Rating:
Summary: Some of the Best Writing on Relationship Marketing
Review: The articles in Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage are wide-ranging, covering manufacturing and services, business and consumer database marketing, and retail. They represent some of the best writing on the subject by experts from around the world.

Edited by academics from the Cranfield School of Management, these articles are supplemented with summaries and commentaries, highlighting a broad scope of issues such as customer retention, employee satisfaction, supplier relations and the management of service quality. These issues are brought together to provide an integrated approach to the development of a relationship marketing strategy. They have been designed to reinforce themes first developed in Relationship Marketing by Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford).