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1 Introduction
Over the past four decades, marketing is thought to have significantly contributed to business performance and has assisted many world-class businesses to achieve outstanding results. Although many academics as well as industry experts strongly believe in the strategic role of marketing in today's business operations and performance, marketing's contribution to organisations' performance, success and, indeed, to shareholder value (SV) has been questioned and criticised. A stream of researchers has emerged from services and industrial marketing who argue that traditional marketing strategy (MS) is inadequate for service businesses and it lacks customer orientation ([29] Booms and Bitner, 1981; [86] Gronroos, 1994; [164] Rafiq and Ahmed, 1995; [187] Webster, 1998; [82] Gombeski, 1998; [139] O'Malley and Patterson, 1998; [47] Day and Montgomery, 1999; [121] Lovelock, 2001; [5] Akroush et al. , 2005; [3] Akroush, 2010). The rationale behind their argument is that services have unique characteristics that create special problems and challenges in service businesses, which require different marketing strategies to tackle them. This school of thought was also criticised on the basis that the elaboration of the traditional MS components (e.g. adding the 3Ps) based on the transactional paradigm might not add value for today's industrial and service businesses since this elaboration is still within the context of the exchange marketing concept which has dominated marketing thinking for many years. Furthermore, such elaboration would not achieve the required paradigm shift in marketing theory and practice, e.g. relationship marketing ([114] Kent, 1986; [90] Gummesson, 1994; [85], [86] Gronroos, 1990, 1994; [186] Webster, 1992; [139] O'Malley and Patterson, 1998).
Another stream of researchers argue that marketing needs a paradigm shift due to changing business environment and customers' needs, unprecedented advancements in information technology, severe competition and emerging new competitive spheres and changes in regulatory environments nationally and globally. This stream of research has introduced relationship marketing, a paradigm shift, as an alternative paradigm to transactional marketing which has contributed to the marginal influence of marketing in today's business performance ([186] Webster, 1992; [90] Gummesson, 1994; [134] Morgan and Hunt, 1994; [87], [88] Gronroos, 1996, 2004; [153] Payne and Frow, 2005; [151] Osarenkhoe and Bennani, 2007). Their argument is that relationship marketing should be adopted as a new MS for businesses which should lead to achieve the...