Relationship Marketing Strategies: Dynamic Underpinnings that Guide Strategic Marketing Relations

To leverage relationship marketing strategies, a firm should recognize and acknowledge that connecting with customers implies an understanding of a number of conditions that can help or hinder such relationships. One such condition is temporal dynamics.

In what follows, I argue that when marketing relationship strategies are considered through the lens of temporal dynamics, effects that we once thought stable and responses we once thought predictable can no longer be expected. More specifically, Essay 1 investigates marketing relational agreements in the context of networked markets. While establishing exclusivity agreements between the hardware manufacturer and software developer is a common practice, I argue that exclusivity can and should be considered more dynamically. For instance, this essay investigates how software developers benefit from temporarily exclusive agreements. Through a number of empirical and experimental studies, I show that temporal exclusivity, as opposed to full or no exclusivity, generates the greatest of utilities for the software developer in the long run.

Essay 2 focuses on relational investment strategies, defined as seller-driven activities including time, effort, tangible as well as intangible resources utilized to foment a business relationship. While it has been argued that the benefits of relationship marketing investments are consistently positive, there is a gap, as extant literature has not accounted for the fact that relationships are dynamic by nature. Therefore, the purpose of this essay is to understand the dynamic impact of relational investment across the different relational phases that govern a business relationship. Across several experiments, we show that different mechanisms play a significant role in advancing or harming relationships as a result of different relational marketing investment strategies.