Relationship Marketing Strategy and implementation

Introduction

Strategy is the art of creating value. It provides the intellectual frame-

works, conceptual models and governing ideas that allow a company’s

managers to identify opportunities for bringing value to customers

and for delivering that value at a profit. In this respect, strategy is the

way a company defines its business and links together the only two

resources that really matter in today’s economy: knowledge and rela-

tionships or an organization’s competencies and customers.

Normann, R. and Ramirez, R.,

From value chain to value constellation: Designing interactive

strategy.

Harvard Business Review, July–August, 1993, pp. 65–77

The transition that is now underway from the classic transactional
approach to buyer/seller relationships to the collaborative, interac-
tive mode that we now call Relationship Marketing implies much
more than a change in philosophy. Whereas the traditional
approach to marketing was based upon the management of the so-
called marketing mix, relationship marketing instead is built upon
the management of a number of key stakeholder domains – the ‘six
markets’ as we have dubbed them in this book and elsewhere.
Classic ‘4 Ps’ marketing was based upon a mechanistic, almost
manipulative, approach to consumers. It implied that if the right
marketing mix could be deployed, then a sale would result. It was
as if a formula could be determined to programme the marketing
mix for optimal results. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s there were
many scholarly attempts to present the management of the market-
ing mix as a mathematical exercise.1–3
It is possible that these more formalized approaches to marketing
planning and strategy determination were appropriate for the envi-
ronment of the time – in other words, high growth markets with
consumers who for the first time had higher levels of discretionary
income to dispose of than at any time in the past. Today, however,
with many markets now better described as mature and in many
cases closer to commodity markets and with ever higher levels of
consumer awareness and sophistication, a different approach is
required.

Creating and implementing relationship marketing strategies 407