Relationship Marketing: Viewing the State-of-the-Art Across Perspectives

Relationship marketing has emerged as one of the dominant frameworks guiding marketing theory and practice. Yet, recent evidence suggests that there is no consistency in efforts at theory development in the field to date. There are several reasons for this diagnosis. First, relationship marketing has been examined from various perspectives within the field of marketing. While it is understandable that relationship marketing would focus on different issues in different contexts (e.g., services versus channels versus business-to-business markets) no synergy has developed among the various findings. Second, as a result of the compartmentalized approach, key constructs such as trust, equity, and commitment, have been operationalized many different ways. Again, this fragmentation leads to an incomplete picture and findings of limited practical application. Third, most of the scholarly research, regardless of perspective, has focused on relationship formation and not relationship maintenance, redefinition and dissolution. The primary purpose of this paper, therefore, is to develop a general theoretical framework for examining marketing relationship development as a dynamic process over which relationships continue to evolve. The proposed framework is based on the premise that the nature of dominant influencing constructs--trust, equity, and commitment, for example--change as a relationship develops, and that the relative importance of the dimensions of each construct may vary at different phases of a relationship.