add value. Some organizations have gone further still, turning to
partnerships and strategic alliances with customers, suppliers and
competitors to further enhance and exploit their capabilities. In
doing so these organizations are moving along an evolutionary con-
tinuum towards the type of network structures thought, by a
growing band of authoritative writers, to be the most appropriate
way to balance the rival competitive demands of greater organiza-
tional specialization and flexibility.20–22This combination of special-
ization and complexity should theoretically make them ideally
suited for the creation and delivery of customer value. Furthermore,
while not all networks are formed around the premise of delivering
superior customer value, the most successful network designs are
those that are customer-driven.^23
The reshaping of organizations towards flatter, more responsive
network forms and the rise of relationship marketing are related,
not as cause and effect, but as part of the same phenomena. Both are
responses to environmental turbulence and pursue a common goal
- the creation of competitive advantage in a changing world. The
fact that they are rarely recognized as symptomatic of a common
cause means that they are not always approached in a deliberate or
coordinated manner.
Whether organizational changes are overtly marketing driven or
not, marketing’s role within these new functionally desegregated
organizations has been transformed. The long-term survival of the
functionally defined marketing department remains a moot point,
but the widely quoted survey by the London branch of Coopers &
Lybrand concluded that ‘marketing as a discipline is more vital than
ever’.^24 Marketing’s new remit will revolve around maximizing cus-
tomer value through the boundary spanning roles of customer
advocate, internal integrator, strategic director and, within network
organizations, partnership broker. Against this backdrop there are
calls for effective new frameworks that conceptualize the properties
and scope of relationship marketing. In 1991, Christopher, Payne
and Ballantyne put forward the prototype of their Six Markets
model as such a framework.
The Six Markets model
The Six Markets model addresses relationship marketing at the
organizational level. It presents for consideration six role-related
4 Relationship Marketing