Marketing Relationship Marketing Entails Developing Long-Term Commitment

Marketing

Relationship marketing entails developing long-term commitment and brand loyalty. Customers who consistently receive communications and information from vendors will be more likely to continue doing business. If the customer is dissatisfied, these communications will allow all complaints to be voiced so that the vendor can effectively change the nature of the product or service. Fitting products and services to customer needs is an essential aspect of successful, profitable business operations. Through relationship marketing, businesses have the opportunity to keep abreast of customer opinions and discover ways in which they can change to meet the changing demands of the market. Relationship marketing also gives those companies that use it a competitive advantage over those that do not and therefore offers the opportunity to become an industry leader.

However, relationship marketing poses many challenges for companies. First, large corporations cannot afford to employ some of the techniques used in relationship marketing because of the enormous size of the potential new customer base. In the case of large corporations, mass marketing techniques must be used initially, to create brand awareness and alert consumers. Creating a database of customers is costly and time-consuming and would involve hiring many more customer service personnel as well as marketing directors to make sure that customers were indeed engaging in a "relationship" with the business over time. The difficulty with relationship marketing is that it can be more costly and involved than mass marketing and the payoffs often aren't visible for long periods of time. This, though, is the essence of relationship marketing: developing long-term customer relationships and commitments that last over time. Such long-term relationships may indeed prove more profitable than short-lived sales. Furthermore, having fewer long-term customers that are targeted through relationship marketing may prove cheaper than luring potential new customers constantly through mass marketing techniques.