One more time – what is marketing? 11
competition is strongly associated with most
West European economies, and also with Japan
and the ‘tiger’ economies of South East Asia,
most of which have achieved a consistently
better economic performance than the USA and
UK since 1950.
The essential difference between the Anglo-
Saxon/marketing management approach and
the Alpine/Germanic style of competition is
that the former takes a short-term, zero-sum
adversarial view based on one-off transactions
while the later adopts a long-term perspective
which promotes win–win relationships.
Relationship marketing
According to M ̈oller and Halinen-Kaila (1997)
relationship marketing or RM was the ‘hot
topic’ of the marketing discipline during the
1990s, but ‘the rhetoric is often characterized
more by elegance than by rigorous examination
of the actual contents’ (p. 2/3). The debate
raises at least four critical questions:
1 Will RM replace the traditional marketing
management school?
2 Will RM make marketing management theory
obsolete?
3 Is RM a completely new theory, or does it
derive from older traditions?
4 Do we need different theories of RM
depending on the type of exchange
relationships?
M ̈oller and Halinen-Kaila seek to answer
these questions. In doing so they stress the need
to look back as well as forward and link new
ideas with existing knowledge. They see the
current interest in RM as deriving from four
basic sources – marketing channels, business-
to-business marketing (interorganizational
marketing), services marketing and direct and
database marketing (consumer marketing).
The dominant marketing management
paradigm founded on the manipulation of the
mix began to be questioned in the 1970s as it
provided an inadequate explanation of the
marketing of services. Such a challenge was
unsurprising given that services had become
the largest sector in the advanced industrial
economies. Specifically, services marketing
calls for recognition of both buyer and seller in
the exchange process. Developments in infor-
mation technology during the 1980s made it
possible to both model and operationalize
individual relationships through the use of
databases.
However, the different research approa-
ches are derived from different perspectives
and conceptual frames of reference and provide
only partial explanations which have yet to be
synthesized and integrated into a holistic meta-
theory. Metatheory is derived from meta analy-
sis which follows one of two closely related
approaches – profiling or typology develop-
ment. The latter tends to be abstract, the former
descriptive, and it is this procedure which is
followed by M ̈oller and Halinen-Kaila who
develop a detailed comparison matrix in which
they examine the four traditions specified
earlier across a number of dimensions, as
illustrated in Table 1.1. While the authors
acknowledge that such a matrix glosses over
many details, none the less it provides useful
generalization of the ways in which the differ-
ent research traditions handle exchange rela-
tionships. To reduce the complexity of their
comparison matrix with its four traditions, the
authors collapse these into two categories –
consumer and interorganizational relationships- and summarize their salient characteristics as
in Table 1.1.
Although relationships are recognized as
existing on a continuum in terms of close-
ness/involvement of the parties, the definition
of the two categories is seen as helpful in
‘anchoring’ the ends of this continuum. This
distinction is reinforced when one considers
the different viewpoint or perspective taken
in terms of the underlying assumptions on
which consumer and interorganizational rela-
tionships have been evaluated – the former