Defining Relationship Marketing: A review of Research

Abstract

The term “relationship marketing” has become a popular concept among the practitioners of marketing as well as academics during the last several years. It is very beneficial to firms because it can foster customer loyalty and re-patronage behaviour. Apart from its growing popularity among academia and practitioners, still there exists no consensus on the basic “constructs” of relationship marketing. Different authors have different opinions about what should and what should not be at the core of what constitutes “relationship marketing”. In view of this, an attempt is made in this paper to collect and analyse 36 definitions of relationship marketing from different sources of previous literature. Content analysis methodology has been used to identify the underlying “constructs” in each of the 36 definitions. The results suggest that there are seven RM “constructs” which constitute the major conceptualisations of relationship marketing. Out of 36 definitions of relationship marketing, only one definition is judged as being more comprehensive and generally acceptable and a new definition for relationship marketing is presented as an inducement to further research and discussion.