From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing

Discusses the nature and sometimes negative consequences of the dominating marketing paradigm of today, marketing mix management, and furthermore discusses how modern research into, for example, industrial marketing and services marketing as well as customer relationship economics shows that another approach to marketing is required This development is supported by evolving trends in business, such as strategic partnerships, alliances and networks Suggests relationship marketing, based on relationship building and management, as one emerging new marketing paradigm of the future Concludes that the simplicity of the marketing mix paradigm, with its Four P model, has become a straitjacket, fostering toolbox thinking rather than an awareness that marketing is a multi‐faceted social process, and notes that marketing theory and customers are the victims of today′s mainstream marketing thinking By using the notion of a marketing strategy continuum, discusses a number of consequences of a relationship‐type ma

From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing

Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry

As firms work tod engage customers better, researchers have attempted to understand customer engagement (CE) empirically. CE goes beyond purchase and is the level of the customer's (or potential cu...

A Generalized Multidimensional Scale for Measuring Customer Engagement

Customer engagement has recently emerged in both academic literature and practitioner discussions as a brand loyalty predictor that may be superior to other traditional loyalty antecedents. However, empirical inquiry on customer engagement is relatively scarce. As tourism and hospitality firms have widely adopted customer engagement strategies for managing customer–brand relationships, further understanding of this concept is essential. Using structural equation modeling, this study investigates the linkages of customer engagement with traditional antecedents of brand loyalty. Results based on 496 hotel and airline customers suggest that customer engagement enhances customers’ service brand evaluation, brand trust, and brand loyalty. The results show that service brand loyalty can be strengthened not only through the service consumption experience but also through customer engagement beyond the service encounter. This study contributes to the literature by providing an empirical evaluation of the relation...

The Role of Customer Engagement in Building Consumer Loyalty to Tourism Brands

Purpose – The advent of the internet and in particular the interactive features of Web 2.0 in recent years have led to an explosion of interest in customer engagement. The opportunities presented by social media to help build close relationships with customers seem to have excited practitioners in a wide variety of industries worldwide. Academic scholarship on customer engagement, however, has lagged practice and its theoretical foundation is relatively underdeveloped and a better understanding of the concept is essential to develop strategies for customer engagement. This paper seeks to address some of these issues.Design/methodology/approach – The paper attempts to enhance understanding of customer engagement by examining practitioner views of customer engagement, linking it to the marketing concept, market orientation, and relationship marketing, modeling the customer engagement cycle, and developing a customer engagement matrix.Findings – The paper develops a model of the customer engagement cycle wit...

Customer engagement, buyer‐seller relationships, and social media

Market selection in business‐to‐business (B2B) market transactions is more complex than the one‐step market segmentation decision in consumer markets. This article models market selection and procurement decision‐making in B2B markets as a five‐step procedure involving choice of vertical and horizontal markets. Vertical market choice decisions are shown to encompass choice of output markets, value adding that the organization will perform internally (the “make” decision), and input markets (the “buy” decision). Horizontal market choice decisions are shown to encompass choice of macro segments in the output market and micro segments within each of the macro segments selected. Explores how we can draw on theoretical developments in industrial organization economics to help make these strategic decisions. The article suggests how to set the boundaries of the organization and determine what markets to serve, what to make, and what to buy with the help of transaction cost and market structure analysis.

C.M. Sashi

Papers

Customer engagement, buyer‐seller relationships, and social media

Market selection and procurement decisions in B2B markets

Franchise network relationships and word of mouth communication in social media networks