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Abstract
The term ‘relationship marketing’ can be traced to the industrial and services marketing literature of the 1980s. In the industrial marketing literature, the early work of Levitt (1983) focused on the notion that the real value of a relationship between a customer and a supplier occurs after the sale. He argued that the supplier’s emphasis needed to shift from closing a sale to delivering superior customer satisfaction throughout the lifetime of the customer relationship. Further work by Jackson (1985) was among the first literature to differentiate between transaction marketing and relationship marketing. Her work outlined the importance of relationships and how the context of the industrial sale sets the scene for the type of relationship that is possible. She argued that building and enhancing long-term customer relationships involves concentrating on a number of things that have to be executed over long periods and in a consistent manner. Her work was based on organisations operating in the shipping, communications and computer industries.