Relationship Marketing - Essay Example

To keep the relationship alive, relationship marketing becomes essential. This does not mean that the company should be ‘best friends’ with the client, rather it signifies the idea that a company should use a marketing system in which the marketing stress is placed on creating a long term relationship with customers which comes with the promise of repeat business rather than individual sales (Stone & Woodcock, 1995). This process involves a perceptive understanding of the client’s needs as the customers go through their lifecycle with the company and the satisfaction of those needs as the customer experiences them.

Relationship marketing is based on the concepts of marketing but it uses cross functional teams that cut across various departments in a company to provide excellent and complete services to the clients. Rather than have the client go to different locations to get the pricing, service, promotions and other elements of the marketing mix, the entire marketing process can be handled by a team which comprises of various members of the company to provide multiple points of contact for customer groups (Peck et. al., 1999).

Therefore relationship marketing is also considered to be a system which is similar to customer relationship management. This is done because the focus is on satisfying the needs of the customer rather than the needs of the company. In such a process, the product and the product lifecycle take differing positions of importance since different types and elements of marketing must be used as the customer and the product itself goes through various phases of maturity. Since the topic of relationship marketing is quite vast, it has been successfully applied to everything from consumable food items (Normandy & Sanders, 2004) to high end luxury cars (Stone et. al. 1996).

While a chocolate might have a smaller life as a product, a good car remains with the buyer for several years if not several