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The importance of developing and maintaining enduring relationships with customers of service businesses is generally accepted in the marketing literature. A key challenge for researchers is to identify and understand how managerially controlled antecedent variables influence important relationship marketing outcomes (e.g., customer loyalty and word-of-mouth communication). Relational benefits, which have a focus on the benefits consumers receive apart from the core service, and relationship quality, which focuses on the overall nature of the relationship, represent two approaches to understanding customer loyalty and word of mouth. This article integrates these two concepts by positioning customer satisfaction and commitment as relationship quality dimensions that partially mediate the relationship between three relational benefits (confidence benefits, social benefits, and special treatment benefits) and the two outcome variables. The results provide support for the model and indicate that the concepts of customer satisfaction, commitment, confidence benefits, and social benefits serve
to significantly contribute to relationship marketing outcomes in services.
Nearly two decades have passed since the first mention of the relationship marketing concept by Berry (1983), but the concept is still in vogue, maybe more than ever. Brown (1997) observed, not without a touch of irony, that faced with the prospect of missing the last train to scientific respectability, many marketing academics ... are desperately rummaging through their past publications and rejected manuscripts in a frantic search for the magic word, the word which will enable them to announce that they have been relationship marketers all along and are thus entitled to a seat on board. (p. 171)
The concept has found its place in marketing theory and has become an integral part of standard textbooks on marketing (e.g., Kotler 1997) and consumer behavior (e.g., Sheth, Mittal, and Newman 1999). All in all, using the vocabulary of life cycle theory, the concept of relationship marketing is approaching its maturity stage (Berry 1995).
A key goal of relationship marketing theory is the identification of key drivers that influence important outcomes for the firm and a better understanding of the causal relations between these drivers and outcomes. In the marketing literature, several different approaches have been used to identify these variables and to learn about their impact on relational outcomes. Most of the existing approaches focus on a single...