Relationship marketing—establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges—constitutes a major shift in marketing theory and practice. After conceptualizing relationship marke...

The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing

The authors integrate theory developed in several disciplines to determine five cognitive processes through which industrial buyers can develop trust of a supplier firm and its salesperson. These p...

An Examination of the Nature of Trust in Buyer–Seller Relationships:

Marketing managers must know the time orientation of a customer to select and use marketing tools that correspond to the time horizons of the customer. Insufficient understanding of a customer's ti...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1252265.pdf

Determinants of Long-Term Orientation in Buyer-Seller Relationships:

Although the relationship metaphor dominates contemporary marketing thought and practice, surprisingly little empirical work has been conducted on relational phenomena in the consumer products domain, particularly at the level of the brand. In this article, the author: (1) argues for the validity of the relationship proposition in the consumer-brand context, including a debate as to the legitimacy of the brand as an active relationship partner and empirical support for the phenomenological significance of consumer-brand bonds; (2) provides a framework for characterizing and better understanding the types of relationships consumers form with brands; and (3) inducts from the data the concept of brand relationship quality, a diagnostic tool for conceptualizing and evaluating relationship strength. Three in-depth case studies inform this agenda, their interpretation guided by an integrative review of the literature on person-to-person relationships. Insights offered through application of inducted concepts to two relevant research domains — brand loyalty and brand personality — are advanced in closing. The exercise is intended to urge fellow researchers to refine, test, and augment the working hypotheses suggested herein and to progress toward these goals with confidence in the validity of the relationship premise at the level of consumers’ lived experiences with their brands.

Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research

Although the relationship metaphor dominates contemporary marketing thought and practice, surprisingly little empirical work has been conducted on relational phenomena in the consumer products domain, particularly at the level of the brand. In this article, the author: (1) argues for the validity of the relationship proposition in the consumer-brand context, including a debate as to the legitimacy of the brand as an active relationship partner and empirical support for the phenomenological significance of consumer-brand bonds; (2) provides a framework for characterizing and better understanding the types of relationships consumers form with brands; and (3) inducts from the data the concept of brand relationship quality, a diagnostic tool for conceptualizing and evaluating relationship strength. Three in-depth case studies inform this agenda, their interpretation guided by an integrative review of the literature on person-to-person relationships. Insights offered through application of inducted concepts to two relevant research domains—brand loyalty and brand personality—are advanced in closing. The exercise is intended to urge fellow researchers to refine, test, and augment the working hypotheses suggested herein and to progress toward these goals with confidence in the validity of the relationship premise at the level of consumers' lived experiences with their brands.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/209515.pdf

Consumers and their brands : developing relationship theory in consumer research

Marketing theory and practice have focused persistently on exchange between buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, most of the research and too many of the marketing strategies treat buyer-seller excha...

Developing Buyer-Seller Relationships:

Like any system, a marketing channel will thrive only to the extent it can secure critical resources from the environment. Using a resource dependence perspective, the authors hypothesize that a we...

Output Sector Munificence Effects on the Internal Political Economy of Marketing Channels

Despite potent theory to contrast transactional governance in “markets and hierarchies,” the variety of extant channel systems strains this dichotomy. The authors examine three contractually integr...

Sejo Oh

Papers

Developing Buyer-Seller Relationships:

Output Sector Munificence Effects on the Internal Political Economy of Marketing Channels

A Transaction Cost Perspective on Vertical Contractual Structure and Interchannel Competitive Strategies

Interfirm relationships in korean electric/electronic parts industry