The Customer-salesperson Relationship and Sales Effectiveness in Luxury Fashion Stores: The Role of Self Monitoring

Abstract

Abstract Among the diverse strategies that businesses use to maximize sales, the customer-salesperson relationship as an aspect of relationship marketing has been reported as one of the most critical (O’Malley and Tynan, 1998). Although relationship marketing has been emphasized across various business settings, this strategy works particularly well in luxury markets for a number of reasons. For example, brands offering high involvement products (i.e., luxury brand products) focus on relationship marketing rather than those offering low involvement products (Martin, 1998). Previous researchers have recognized the role of various customers attributes in sales interactions (Walker et al., 1977; Weitz, 1981). One customer attribute that may play a role in moderating the association between the strength of customer-salesperson relationship and sales effectiveness is a customer’s tendency to self-monitor (Snyder, 1974). This is due to the fact that an individuals’ self monitoring tendency has been recognized a...