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WHAT IS RELATIONSHIP MARKETING

"Relationship marketing is the ongoing process of identifying and creating new values with individual customers and then sharing the benefits from this over a lifetime of association. It involves the understanding, focusing
and management of ongoing collaboration between suppliers and selected customers for mutual value creation and sharing through independence
and organizational alignment."

(Gordon, Ian. 1998:9)

The reason behind choosing this definition for the relationship marketing is, this definition is trying to cover almost the maximum essence and meaning of relationship marketing. Gordon has presented it in very simple words. According to him the relationship marketing is an ongoing process in which an organisation identifies its customers and creates a relationship with them not only to gain profits but to share the benefits together (organization and customers), and he also mentions that it is an lifetime association between them. In the second part of the definition, he includes the content of the relationship marketing i.e. understanding, focusing
and management of the collaboration between the supplier and the selected customers. These are the key words of the definition which tells the content of the relationship marketing. In the first part of the definition Gordon used one of the most typical word i.e. lifetime, it tells about relationship marketing is a long term relationship process. So for building lifetime relationship with customers, organisations need to have bonding more tightly with the customers.

"Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing in the 1960s and emerged in the 1980s, in which emphasis is placed on building longer term relationships with customers rather than on individual transactions. It involves understanding the...