Buyer-Seller Exchange Situations

Abstract

From having focused almost entirely on exchange transactions in consumer goods markets, in the 1970s, academics expanded their analysis to include relational exchanges-in particular business-to-business markets and service markets. The contextual changes of the 1990s (i.e., the explosion of IT and the Internet) resulted in the introduction of relationship marketing as an alternative marketing approach in consumer goods markets introducing the notion of a shift in exchange paradigms. However, in the late 1990s, a number of authors on service marketing (e.g., Liljander & Strandvik, 1995), on business-to-business marketing (e.g., Anderson & Narus, 1999) and on contemporary marketing practices (e.g., Brodie, Coviello, Brookes & Little, 1997) supported the thesis that in many markets the process that actually takes place is one of co-existence of transactional exchanges and relational exchanges. Based on the “pluralistic approach” (Pels, Coviello & Brodie, 1999, 2000), this paper develops four cases that seek to exemplify the different exchange situations that may occur in a given marketplace.