Handbook of Relationship Marketing

Citation

Renart, L.G. (2001), "Handbook of Relationship Marketing", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 179-189. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2001.18.2.179.3

This is a “must read” book for professors who wish to start or to continue serious academic work in this emerging field of relationship marketing as well as for practitioners who increasingly need to focus on establishing a relationship with each of their customers.

The idea for this book originated as a result of a special session organized by the authors at the Academy of Marketing Science conference in 1994, which was also the cradle of a special issue of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS).

This thick handbook is organized in five parts, with a total of 23 chapters:

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  Part I: Domain, evolution and growth of relationship Marketing: alternative perspectives;

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  Part II: Conceptual and theoretical foundations of relationship marketing;

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  Part III: Partnering for relationship marketing;

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  Part IV: Enablers of relationship marketing;

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  Part V: Teaching and research implications of relationship marketing.

Just by looking at the titles of these five parts of the contents, one may already expect what is confirmed by the authors in the Preface: “The purpose of this book is to provide a foundation for developing textbooks” (p. xi). And “the intent of the authors is to provide a comprehensive scholarly book to students and faculty … including a broad coverage of topics, diverse perspectives, theoretical and conceptual paradigms, and scholarly representation” (p. xii).

I think the book serves its academic purpose particularly well. Over the years, Jagdish Sheth has repeatedly proven his erudition, and this book is a commendable continuation of his deeply ingrained personal tradition. I consider the following chapters particularly interesting.

Parvatiyar and Sheth’s first chapter “The domain and conceptual foundations of relationship marketing”, where they define it as “The ongoing process of engaging in cooperative and collaborative activities and programs with immediate and end‐user customers to create or enhance mutual economic value at reduced cost.” They also suggest that the domain of relationship marketing should be limited “to only those cooperative and collaborative marketing actions that are focused on serving the needs of customers.” I agree with their suggestion, which is consistent with the point of view, forcefully stated by the late Thomas V. Bonoma (1984, p. 4): “What is unique about marketing is that it owns the company’s customer and trade relationships.” I agree with them, because if we were to study the many and very different kinds of relationships established by a corporation with its environment, we will run into a real risk of dispersion of our efforts, probably beyond the scope of marketing itself.

The European perspective is reasonably well represented in the four chapters contributed by Adrian Payne, Hakan Hakansson, Ivan Snehota, Christian Grönroos and Kaj Storbacka, even though their perspective is limited to the UK and especially the “Nordic School” points of view. To gain a broader geographic perspective, interested readers may see the book Relationship Marketing, edited by Henning‐Thurau and Hansen (2000), recently reviewed in Journal of Consumer Marketing.

In chapter 12, Bhattacharya and Bolton present a very interesting model of the consumer’s decision to maintain, build or withdraw from a relationship, in which the key mediating variables, trust and commitment, identified by Morgan and Hunt (1994), appear in a different position. It is particularly interesting that they see commitment not as a mediating variable, but as a relational behavior in which consumers may engage as the result of the relationship marketing efforts designed and implemented by the focal company.

In chapter 13, Thomas W. Gruen presents a very interesting perspective regarding relationship marketing in membership organizations. These are the formalized relationships in which the member has made a formal application, the member is formally recognized as such by the membership organization, and the latter maintains specific memory of the member. Gruen is one of the few in the whole book to elaborate on the possible extrinsic and intrinsic rewards received by members when accepting to participate and to contribute to a relationship. I feel that motivation theories may very fruitfully add to our understanding of the relationship marketing phenomenon.

I particularly enjoyed chapter 16, by David W. Cravens and Karen S. Cravens, on “Horizontal alliances for relationship marketing”. It is full of common sense and wisdom.

I was gratefully and unexpectedly surprised by the unusual humanistic approach of Sisodia and Wolfe in their chapter 20, on “Information technology: its role in building, maintaining and enhancing relationships”. In our present time, with the Internet omnipresent, it is refreshing and reassuring to read that “Satisfying dialogues (and satisfying relationships) depend on the quality of four conditions: reciprocal empathy, reciprocal vulnerability, reciprocal faith and reciprocal trust” (p. 551). It is also encouraging to learn that “strongly bonded, emotionally satisfying relationships require periodic human presence that achieves some qualitative threshold for the parties involved” (p. 544). My own understanding out of these words is that no, Virginia, you cannot have a relationship with a machine, or with a Web page!!Maybe we can transact with a machine, such as our usually‐friendly ATM, but as Sisodia and Wolfe rightfully insist, “Reciprocal empathy is a necessary ingredient of long‐lasting healthy relationships” (p. 552), and “if the delivery is impersonal, marketers will be back in the era of transaction marketing” (p. 554).

Finally, academics may particularly enjoy and find useful the two last chapters constituting Part V of this “Handbook”, on the topics of “Developing a curriculum to enhance teaching of relationship marketing”, and Sheth’s points of view on how relationship marketing may evolve from a domain to a full fledged discipline. He posits that relationship marketing needs to focus in the following eight areas:

1. 1.

   (1) delimit the domain;

2. 2.

   (2) agree on a definition;

3. 3.

   (3) build respectable databases;

4. 4.

   (4) develop performance metrics;

5. 5.

   (5) employ longitudinal research methods;

6. 6.

   (6) publish in top journals;

7. 7.

   (7) encourage respected scholars;

8. 8.

   (8) develop explanatory theory.

The book may also be criticized on a few counts. As one may usually expect in an edited book with 23 chapters by 27 authors, some contributions are more interesting than others. Also one contribution was first published in 1992, another one in 1994 and six were already published in 1995. Therefore, slightly better than one third of the book was written in what we might now call “pre‐Internet era”. In a book about relationship marketing, five years is a very long time.

Yet, my overall impression is that the “Handbook” will serve well its purpose, and I am certainly planning to have it close at hand for future reference. I am sure this book will be a fruitful addition to many personal libraries, not only in the case of professors who may seriously intend to do research and teaching on this particular topic. I am sure it will also be useful to professors doing work in other conceptual fields, but who may occasionally need a good conceptual framework and guidance on the topic of relationship marketing.

Even though, as mentioned above, this “Handbook” seems to be intended for an academic audience, thoughtful executives may also benefit from reading it. First of all, they will be made aware of the different topics and sub‐fields that together constitute the broader field of relationship marketing.

Second, they will probably realize that relationship marketing is a fairly complex field, with many mediating variables playing a role. It is not a simple matter of stimulus‐response, of the simple kind “I give you air miles and you fly my airline”. Executives must be aware of the importance of concepts or mediating variables such as trust, commitment, justice, power, interdependence, values, conflict, length of time, satisfaction, value creation and value sharing, etc.

Finally, all too often, one has the impression that companies who start relationship marketing programs do so with too much unilateral consideration (maybe sometimes with almost exclusive consideration) of what their business interests are, and with too little consideration of their customers’ interests. Both executives and academics should never forget that it is not easy to entice customers to be willing to participate in a reciprocally fruitful, ongoing marketing relationship. This book is a substantial contribution to helping all of us understand why.