BUSINESS

Services and Relationship Marketing

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Services and Relationship Marketing

Introduction

It is normally agreed that both goods and services have different characteristics and both have different marketing approaches. A form of marketing that was developed for directing the response of the marketing campaigns that were found emphasizing customer satisfaction and retention rather than mainly focusing on transactions of sales is commonly known as relationship marketing.

Relationship marketing is one of the most important types of marketing that adds value to the services that are rendered by an organisation or company. Relationship marketing is different from all other forms of marketing as it extends communicational channel beyond the intrusive advertising, recognizes the long term value of having sound customer relationships and sales promotional messages. Relationship marketing helps in keeping the organisation in keeping positive and healthy relationships among the customers (Dyer, 1998, p.660).

Relationship marketing has gained a lot of strength mainly due to the growth of mobile platforms and internet and is still moving forward and evolving as the technology has opened more social communication and collaborative channels. It also includes tools that can help an organisation in managing relationships with the customers, who go beyond simple customers' service and demographic data. Relationship marketing includes broad range of activities that include public relations management, application development, social media and marketing efforts that is based on a combination of strategic content and search optimization. There are various approaches to relationship marketing that can be even beneficial in service marketing as well.

Discussion

Relationship marketing is a widely implemented strategy and is broadly recognized for nurturing and managing a company's interactions or relationships with sales prospects and clients. Due to technology, service marketing activities have become easy to manage and the business processes have become more synchronized (Tax, 1998, p.75). The main goals and objectives of relationship marketing is to find, attract and win new clients along with retaining and nurturing those clients that the company already holds. It also helps an organisation in enticing the ex-clients back into the fold along with reducing the costs of client service and marketing.

Nowadays, relationship marketing has become a company-wide business strategy that supports the organisations in embracing all the departments that are facing customers. It is observed that whenever a strategy is effectively designed and implemented, it brings positive effects on people, processes and it also brings synergy that ultimately enhances the productivity, profitability along with reduction in operational costs (Samiee, 2003, p.193).

Approaches to Relationship Marketing

The approaches to relationship marketing are as follows:

Satisfaction

Relationship marketing mainly depends on the acquisition and communication of requirements of the consumer mainly from existing customers in a mutually beneficial exchange that normally involves permission for contact by the customer with the help of 'opt-in' system. Customer satisfaction is nowadays considered as one of the most important aspect of doing business without which a business cannot flourish at all (Lovelock, 2004, p.20). Customers can be only kept satisfied by providing quality of goods, relative price and quality of services sold or ...