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Keywords Agriculture, Fruit, Vegetables, Marketing strategy, Relationship marketing,
Research methods
Abstract This article focuses on the relationship marketing approach to marketing of agricultural products. The article provides specific insights into, and comparisons between, suppliers of two particular agricultural products sectors: in Britain, the fresh produce (fruits and vegetables) sector and, in New Zealand, the wine sector. The article examines the nature of marketing relationships from the perspective of the suppliers in these sectors and their relationships, networks, and interactions with importers and retail buyers in the food and beverage industry. The research methodology is qualitative and inductive in nature and utilises multiple cases. Interpretation is first through content analysis of each individual case in order to identify important themes, clusters, and patterns in the research data and secondly through across-case analysis. Investigated marketing issues include the following: nature of relationship marketing, implementation of relationship marketing, and monitoring and measurement of relationship marketing.
Introduction: a relational approach to marketing
In the 1980s and certainly in the 199(1s, relationship marketing gained ground in marketing as a response to an increasing dissatisfaction with the "classical" model of marketing based on discrete marketing exchanges through manipulation of the marketing mix (i.e. the Vs: product, price, promotion, and place). In Table I, the two approaches to marketing have been compared and contrasted.
There are two, or more, actors in a business relationship: the buyer who seeks to satisfy a need and the seller who proposes an offer. In transaction marketing, buyers seek solutions to a generic need and sellers present a generic offer. In relationship marketing, on the other hand, sellers have developed a unique offer because buyers want to satisfy a particular need.
For a long time, the industrial marketing literature and marketing channels literature characterised the interaction between actors who are engaging in transactional marketing exchanges in terms of power, conflict, and control. With the introduction of relational marketing exchanges, the interaction between actors is described using constructs such as trust, commitment, and co-operation. This means that an actor who is involved in relational marketing exchanges does not behave opportunistically and does not seek to influence the decisions or actions of the other actor (e.g. Anderson and Narus, 1990; Dwyer et aL, 1987; Mohr and Spekman,...