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"The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see". -Sir Winston Churchill
Introduction
When an important concept has been the subject of study by scholars for a substantial period, it is timely to undertake an assessment of its contribution. Relationship marketing has now grown up. It is over three decades since a conference publication at an American Marketing Association services marketing conference (Berry, 1983) and an influential paper in the Harvard Business Review (Levitt, 1983) started to capture the imagination of scholars and practitioners. It is now appropriate to reflect on both the past history and future prospects for relationship marketing. We offer a personal reflection on relationship marketing, a field that has had a strong influence on our work and that of numerous scholars.
The study of relationship marketing originated in the areas of industrial marketing (Levitt, 1983) and services marketing (Gummesson, 1977; Grönroos, 1983). However, Berry's (1983) use of the specific term "relationship marketing" was what raised great interest amongst scholars. The rise of relationship marketing since then was not so much a discovery as a rediscovery of an approach that has long proved to be the cornerstone of many successful enterprises. The first academic text book on relationship marketing was published in 1991 (Christopher et al. , 1991), and the first practitioner book was also published that year (McKenna, 1991). By the mid-1990s, relationship marketing was receiving increased visibility, in terms of marketing practice and academic research, after being "on marketing's back burner for so many years" (Berry, 1995, p. 237). With an increasing number of scholars undertaking research in relationship marketing, it was not surprising that different themes and foci were starting to develop. These different perspectives were recognised by Coote (1994), who characterised three approaches to relationship marketing (Figure 1).
Two of these approaches, Anglo-Australian approach (Christopher et al. , 1991) and the Nordic School (Gummerus and von Koskull, 2015), had much in common. By contrast, the North American approach (Sheth and Parvatiyar, 1995) emphasised dyadic relationships between supplier and customer in the context of the organisational environment. Although Coote's typology of alternative approaches to relationship marketing is not complete, it is useful in highlighting the different foci that were developing.
Growth and maturing of...