Customer Relationship Marketing: Customer-Centric Processes for Engendering Customer- Firm Bonds and Optimizing Long-Term Customer Value

Relationship marketing puts forward that firms’ interactions with a variety of agents are part of an ongoing process (akin to a relationship) as opposed to being discrete transactional events (Morgan & Hunt, 1994). Research within the area has examined interactions with numerous internal and external agents—such as, those that occur internally with employees (e.g., Arndt, 1983), within and across functional areas (e.g., Ruekert & Walker, 1987) and business units (e.g., Porter, 1987), as well as externally with service providers (e.g., Moorman, Zaltman, & Deshpande, 1992), suppliers (e.g., Frazier, Spekman, & O’Neal, 1988), allied companies (e.g., Bucklin & Sengupta, 1993), and customers (Berry, 1983). While a holistic conceptualization of relationship marketing encompasses a network of all relational exchanges relative to a firm (Morgan & Hunt, 1994), a focus on profitable relationships with customers has gained traction as well as undergone transformation in recent years (Kumar & Reinartz, 2006; Thomas, Reinartz, & Kumar 2004).