Relationship Marketing Strategy and implementation

interactive relationships for various purposes, between the focal
firm and an array of other parties (see Figure 1.4).^15 The parties are:
goods and services suppliers; the firm’s own business units,
employees and functional departments; immediate and ultimate
customers; and competitors, governments and non-profit organiza-
tions. Morgan and Hunt proceed to categorize these into four broad
partnership types: supplier, internal, buyer and lateral.
Similarly, Doyle offers a general framework for relationship mar-
keting ‘which permits the integration of the key concepts of core
capabilities, strategic intent and value creation’.^16 His framework
deconstructs relationship marketing, identifying a series of dyadic
relationships between the firm’s central core and ten types of
‘network partners’. He follows Morgan and Hunt’s general taxon-
omy, explicitly adding strategic alliance partners to the lateral, or
‘external’, category (see Figure 1.5).
There are obvious similarities between these new frameworks
and those postulated earlier by Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne,
and by Kotler, both in terms of content and general structure, but
they differ in detail and approach.
The texts supporting each of the frameworks appeared to concen-
trate on the identification and classification of relationships with
either specific parties or compound groups, providing usually very

14 Relationship Marketing

Goods

Suppliers

Services

Suppliers

Competitors

Non-profit

Organizations

Government

Ultimate

Customers

Intermediate

Customers

Functional

Departments

Employees

Business

Units

Focal

Firm

1 2

3

4

5

7 6

8

9

10

Supplier Partnerships

Buyer Partnerships

Lateral

Partnerships

Internal

Partnerships

Figure 1.4 The relational exchanges in relationship marketing.

Source: Morgan and Hunt (1994).^15