RELATIONSHIP MARKETING

Relationship Marketing

Relationship Marketing

1) Executive Summary

Partnerships and destination alliances assume significance with the growth in tourism, and as a destination's assets and resources, such as its infrastructure and recreational facilities are increasingly being shared by its inhabitants, visitors, public and private stakeholders (Jamal & Getz, 2005:85). Concern for sustainability has become the organising concept, central to the management of tourism growth, and has resulted in a changing perspective away from the short term to the long term, which in turn has seen the adoption of a strategic approach to markets and destination planning/ management. Thus, as tourism development takes on the characteristics of a public and social good, whose benefits may be shared by the numerous stakeholders in the local destination, joint decision-making and collaboration amongst them becomes crucial (Long, 2007:95). Not only does collaboration build on the store of knowledge, insights and capabilities of the stakeholders in the destination, but it can promote joint ownership of the resulting policies diminishing the possibility of adversarial conflicts.

2) Introduction

Though it was first coined by Berry (2005) in the United States, relationship marketing as a term was not commonly used until the latter part of the 1980s. The term relationship marketing emphasises variables and processes such as trust, commitment, social norms, and so on. Considering one of the tourism organizations where I work, the key structural issue in relationship marketing stems from its raison d'etre: exchanging resources to provide mutual benefits and thus achieve mutual goals, which differentiate it from the conventional view of marketing, which involves the integrated analysis, planning and control of the 'marketing mix' variables (product, price, promotion, and distribution) to create exchange and satisfy both individual and organisational objectives. This approach is discarded in favour of relationship marketing by authors who consider it to be overly clinical and based solely on short-term economic transactions (Moller, 2002:10), and relevant only to certain types of firms and markets. Relationship marketing draws its ideas from the streams of research which are the Nordic School of Service, which examines management and marketing from a service perspective, and the IMP Group, which takes a network and interaction approach to understanding business practice. A common denominator of these two schools of thought is that marketing is more a management issue than a function, and that managing marketing normally must be built upon relationships, not on transactions alone. Comprehensively, however, it can be defined as the process of identifying and establishing, maintaining and enhancing, and when necessary also terminating relationships with customers and other stakeholders, at a profit so that the objectives of all parties involved are met, and that this is done by a mutual exchange and fulfilment of promises (Gromoos, 2007:19).

There are three key mechanisms inherent in the approach to achieve effective resource management. First, it provides a framework, which focuses on strategic decisions concerning collaboration between providers. Second, it recognises variables like trust, commitment, mutual understanding and reciprocity that encourage and stimulate entrepreneurial and innovative thinking towards partnership ...