keting approaches for the two (trade marketing for the former and
the more traditional consumer marketing approach for the latter).
These two distinct ‘customer’ groups, along with suppliers and
employees, are the four types of players he places within the
company’s immediate ‘task environment’ (i.e those most directly
involved in the supply chain). Morgan and Hunt and Doyle also
each subdivide their customer/buyer categories to distinguish
between intermediaries or distributors as customers or buyers and
ultimate consumers. Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne do discuss
the subdivision of their customer category, but choose to introduce
a time dimension, differentiating between new customers or
prospects and existing customers.
Moving beyond the supply chain, Morgan and Hunt and Doyle
use the terms ‘lateral’ and ‘external’, respectively, for their fourth
and final category. Both offer ‘competitors’ and ‘government’,
together with either ‘non-profit organizations’ or ‘strategic
alliances’, as subcategories; qualifying their inclusion with a
number of specific examples of cooperative alliances between the
focal firm and one of these subcategory parties. In each instance
resource sharing appears to be the basis for the relationships cited,
a point which is explicitly acknowledged by Morgan and Hunt:
Strictly speaking, in strategic alliances between competitors, partner-
ships between firms and government in public-purpose partnerships,
and internal marketing, there are neither ‘buyers’ nor ‘sellers’, ‘cus-
tomers’ nor ‘key accounts’ – only partnersexchanging resources.Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne also include ‘government’
within their framework, but categorize it according to its influential
role as macromarket ‘gatekeeper’, placing it alongside other regula-
tors and facilitators – such as members of the financial community,
media and pressure groups within their ‘Influence Market’.
Interestingly, Kotler takes most of the parties identified by other
writers’ influence/external/lateral parties, including them for
reasons of either resource provision, market access or competitive
co-existence, as players within the company’s macroenvironment,
each warranting their own marketing considerations.
More recently, Gummesson proffered his own framework of rela-
tionship marketing from on-going research into the scope and
generic properties of the phenomenon.^42 Guided by his own defini-
tion of relationship marketing as ‘marketing seen as relationships,
16 Relationship Marketing