Relationship marketing research (1983-2012): an academic review and classification

Abstract

The term Relationship Marketing (RM) was first coined by Berry in 1983, he stressed upon developing close and long–term relationship with customers. Further the literature enriched by scholars in the area of relationship marketing, have one common base of cooperative relationship between customers and firm. This paper attempts to create the much broader classification of RM to provide an insight into RM literature. The present work not only identifies the key indicators in RM but also postulates valuable contributions of conceptual framework for RM over the time horizon since 1983. For the above purpose, seven online databases were searched on RM literature. The study extracted an exhaustive list of literatures on several dimensions and conceptual framework which would be ultimately facilitating the academicians, researchers and industry practitioners in identifying existing studies on relationship marketing. So that scholars can move ahead by extracting new dimensions of relationship marketing on this bibliographic study.