Customer Relationship and Sales Management Essay

Customer Relationship and Sales Management - Essay Example In line with this, the proponent tries to find out more about customer relationship in order to confirm or contradict the idea that ‘Relationship Marketing may still be regarded as an ‘umbrella philosophy’ with numerous relational variations rather than as a wholly unified concept with strongly developed objectives and strategies’ (Egan, 2004). The arguments are illustrated using examples from organisations and appropriate theory in line with relationship marketing and customer relationship. Relationship marketing and marketing activities As mentioned earlier, relationship marketing is a theory generally applied to majority of marketing activities. Relationship marketing is an integral part of every marketing activity because at present, classical marketing is slowly eliminated due to the fact that marketers are more concern on finding loyal customers than looking for new ones (Boone and Kurtz, 2006). This is due to some reasons that it is expensive to find for new customers than maintaining existing ones. In this reason, some organisations aggressively promote their product or service offerings in the hope that they will be able to acquire new potential customers. This in return incurs specific cost that eventually may be added up to the final price of product or service offerings. On the other hand, companies that are confident to cater loyal customers do not need to promote further their service or product offerings. As a result, customers are benefited because no further cost may be incurred for promotion that usually they have to pay as to be integrated in the final price of the offerings. Different types of relationship marketing There are three different and important marketing strategies used by marketers. These include creating customer satisfaction, building brand equity, and creating and maintaining relationships (Sorce, 2002). As can be observed, these three are interrelated. As a result, there is a great chance for a satis fied customer to become loyal to a certain brand he has tried so far. That customer can eventually attest to the performance of the brand which leads further to creating a significant relationship once there is an effort to create or maintain it on the part of marketers. There two major types of marketing: traditional marketing and relationship marketing which includes database marketing, interaction marketing, and network marketing (Brodie et al, 1997).These types of relationship marketing according to Egan (2001) are equivalent to direct marketing, consumer-relationship marketing and business-to-business relationship marketing. According to Brodie and his colleagues, these marketing types often do co-exist due to the fact that there are existing different situations between buyer and seller. However, in today’s modern approach in marketing, there is an added relationship marketing type which is also known as E-marketing which involves the use of internet and interactive tec hnologies to link the firms and their customers (Palmer and Pels, 2005). The database marketing or known as direct marketing is a relationship marketing which is about analysing data obtained from customers and implementing the corresponding results (Blattberg et al., 2008). Blattberg and his colleagues elaborated that database marketing is about the use of customer databases in order to come up with effective acquisition, retention and development of customers which are the main