The marketing Strategy Continuum

8 MANAGEMENT DECISION 29,1
The Relationship Paradigm and Relationship Marketing
During the 1980s a new concept, relationship marketing, emerged in the marketing literature. The marketing budget which is needed to create an interest in afirm'sofferings, and to turn this interest into sales, is high in most situations. It is most often much less expensive to have a stable customer base where resales and cross-sales occur on a regular basis. Moreover, as the competition increases, it becomes more and more important for a firm to protect its existing customer base. Hence, an interest in long-term customer relationships is only natural. Focusing on shortterm deals easily becomes an expensive strategy. The relationship approach to marketing is, for example, based on notions such as the following by Peters. "Most firms have long engaged in warlike relationships with customers... Yet in today's competitive setting, developing lifelong customer relationships is paramount" [19, p.10]. It has emerged as an alternative and complement to the marketing mix approach, which, owing to its de facto focus on single exchanges or transactions, is not considered fully applicable to situations where the development of longterm relationships is called for. In the North American marketing literature the relationship marketing concept was introduced in 1983 by Berry[3] in the context of services marketing. This concept has also been used, for example by Jackson[5], in the context of industrial marketing. In European approaches to services marketing (in what in the USA has been called the Nordic school ofservices) and to industrial marketing (the so-called IMP Group originally based in Sweden but spreading throughout Europe) the similar notion of building longterm relationships has also occurred. The concept of relationship marketing has not been used there. Instead concepts like interactive marketing and building interactive relationships can be found in the literature[7-10, 20-23]. According to the relationship paradigm, marketing is considered as revolving around the development of longterm relationships. It is, for example, defined as follows[10, 20, 24, cf. 3, 21]: Marketing is to establish, maintain and enhance relationships with customers and other parties at a profit so that the objectives of the parties involved are met. This is done by a mutual exchange and fulfilment of promises. This definition can, furthermore, be accompanied by the following supplement. The resources of the seller — people, technology and systems — have to be used in such a manner that the customer's trust in the resources involved, and thus in the firm, is maintained and strengthened. Resources with which the customer (representative of a household or an industrial buyer) makes contact may be of any kind and may be part of any business function. However, these resources and activities cannot be totally predetermined and explicitly categorised. They may vary fromfirmtofirm,from industry to industry, and even from situation to situation. The most important
Introduction In most of the standard literature on marketing and marketing management, the marketing mix is considered the core of marketing decision making[l,2]. There is also a newer body of literature which relates marketing to the development of long-term relationships with customers, and other parties such as suppliers, distributors and financial institutions[3-10]. These two views of marketing represent different paradigms. The marketing approach and activities of a given firm will differ depending on which paradigm, or view of what marketing is, thisfirmapplies. The marketing concept as it is formulated in the standard literature on marketing predominantly related to the exchange concept and leads to the use of a marketing mix paradigm. In this article we argue that the number of marketing strategies that may be used can be seen as a
The Marketing Strategy Continuum:
Towards a Marketing Concept for the 1990s
Christian Grönroos
Management Decision, Vol. 29 No. 1, 1991, pp. 7-13, © MCB University Press Limited, 0025-1747
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continuum. Depending on where on this continuum a given firm places itself, different marketing and management decisions will have to be taken, and internally the firm will function differently. In the 1990s a static view of the marketing c