Reinvigorating Relationship Marketing: A Customer Experience Perspective

Purpose: Relationship marketing is an established area of study that has made significant contributions to the understanding and management of relationships between organizations and their customers. Recently, however, the field has been criticized for its firm-centric focus and dyadic perspective, which overlooks the wider network influences on marketing relationships. Consequently, there have been calls for a reinvigoration of relationship marketing. We propose that this can be supported by integrating it with the more recently developed field of customer experience.
Design / methodology / approach: We develop a reconceptualization of relationship marketing from a customer experience perspective by identifying the challenges faced by relationship marketing from a review of literature. Building upon observed areas of conceptual overlap between the relationship marketing and customer experience fields, we find new approaches to solving these challenges by integrating relationship marketing within a customer experience perspective.
Findings: Our model positions relationship marketing processeses as dynamic and non-linear within the context of key relationship parties’ holistic experiences, and proposes that relationship marketing outcomes such as loyalty can result from customer cogntive, emotional, behavioral, sensorial and spiritual responses to relationship marketing activities.
Originality / value: To our knowledge this is first reconceptualization of relationship marketing that integrates a customer experience perspective. The model supports a new relationship marketing research agenda into promising areas such as customer response and digital relationships using a more diverse range of methods and theories.