Relationship Marketing Essay

Words: 2259
Pages: 10

Relationship marketing has become a dominant form of marketing theory in recent times. It has evolved from other forms of marketing and has countless benefits for businesses that use the relationship strategy. It is limitless in the type of businesses it can be adopted by with new technology and media making it even more popular.

The study of marketing is one that has been fixed on an evolving range of marketing segments over the last fifty years or so. A look at the progress of the changing focus of marketing shows a considerable shift in thinking. In the 1950's marketers were mostly focused on consumer goods, while the 1960's saw a shift towards industrial markets. In the 1970's effort was focused on non-profit or societal marketing,
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Relationship marketing is not simply being employed by retail or manufacturing businesses, but it is also very common in the service industry. The banking industry uses relationship marketing to present their financial packages to its customers. These companies need to identify the customers they need to market their services to which is usually done using databases (Dauer, 1991). A leading example of a financial company doing this is a credit union with $300 million in assets used their customer database to determine the most appropriate customers to market a new bonus rate to. By using the database the company identified 1800 customers, while the cost was limited to just over $400. The end result for the company was an extra $4 million in sales in just four days (Dauer, 1991)

It may come as a surprise but another area where relationship marketing is resulting in many benefits is libraries. Most people will not think of a library when they think of marketing, however libraries are just like any other business; their objective is to attract customers and then to keep the customers. Previously the most commonly accepted marketing concept was the marketing mix or the 4Ps, which was not appropriate for libraries at all. With the advent of relationship marketing, libraries have adopted the concept with great success and it is easy to see why. Relationship marketing is based on an idea of trust and cooperation with customers. Libraries also