Authors: Jonathan Gander; Maurizio Catulli
Companies are increasingly adopting a relational approach when designing anddelivering their marketing activities (De Wulf, 2001 Nancarrow et al, 2003 Lemon et al, 2002). This trend is presented as a shift from a transactionalapproach where brands are built and managed through broad basedcommunication via mass media (Aaker, 1991). Though activities associated withthis relational trend to marketing were initially aimed at industrial and servicemarkets (Grönroos, 1994), technological advances in database design andcapability enabled firms to apply relationship management principles andpractices to mass consumer markets (O?Malley and Tynan, 1998 Winer, 2001 Corner and Hinton, 2002). This widespread application needs to be viewed with adegree of caution, for, as O?Malley and Tynan (1998) observe, there has been atendency to approach the relationship paradigm without sufficient critical analysis.This paper discusses the suitability of relational approaches versus moretransactional oriented brand management practices to inform the firm’s marketingactivities. We set this discussion in a case study involving a specific small tomedium sized firm in the business to business market.
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Publish Year: 2004
Conference: Copenhagen, Denmark (2004)