Young adults’ relationship intentions towards their cell phone network operators

L Kruger,P G Mostert

doi:10.4102/sajbm.v43i2.182

Abstract

Marketers use relationship marketing to establish mutually beneficial long-term relationships with their customers as a means to retain them in the competitive market environment. Relationship marketing should not be used to target every customer as not all customers want to build long-term relationships with organisations. In order to identify the most profitable customers for relationship marketing, organisations should consider their customers’ relationship intentions to form long-term relationships with them. The primary objective of this study was to determine young adults’ (aged 18 to 25) relationship intentions towards the South African cell phone network operators they use, namely Vodacom, MTN or Cell C. Five constructs (involvement, expectations, forgiveness, feedback and fear of relationship loss) were used to measure relationship intention. Data was collected from 315 respondents at a tertiary education institution in South Africa by means of a non-probability convenience sample. Findings indicate that a relatively high percentage of respondents have a high relationship intention towards their cell phone network operator and that respondents with high relationship intentions are more Involved with and Fear losing their relationship with their cell phone network operator than respondents with low relationship intentions

Highlights

Prior to the paradigm shift towards the notion of relationship marketing, marketers’ efforts were primarily described as transactional marketing (Payne, 2006:11)
A total of 315 respondents completed the questionnaire and the sample mainly consisted of young adults aged 18 to 24 years old (97%), with only 3% of respondents being older than 24 years
Since valuable resources could be wasted if organisations apply relationship marketing strategies to customers not desiring a relationship with the organisation (Tuominen, 2007:182; OdekerkenSchröder et al, 2003:178), it would be in the best interest of the organisation to identify those customers who want to form a relationship with them

Summary

Introduction

Prior to the paradigm shift towards the notion of relationship marketing, marketers’ efforts were primarily described as transactional marketing (Payne, 2006:11). Relationship marketing is used to increase value for customers by responding to identified customer needs (Pride & Ferrell, 2010:14) and organisations focus on relationship marketing because long-term customer relationships are favourable for the organisation’s profitability, as a satisfied customer is more likely to spend on additional products and services and spread favourable word-of-mouth communication than short-term customers are likely to do (Liang & Wang, 2006:124). Customers with a transactional intention can constitute a great volume of the business of an organisation, any organisational resources spent on building a relationship with these customers will be wasted (Liang & Wang, 2006:139-140; Kumar, Bohling & Ladda, 2003:668). Organisations should focus their relationship marketing efforts on customers with a relationship intention (Kumar et al, 2003:669), instead of surmising that relationships can be formed with all customers (Odekerken-Schröder, De Wulf & Schumacher, 2003:178)

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