Adrian Palmer

Tourism destination marketing alliances

Abstract Tourism destination marketing involves many stakeholders and a complex product offer. Complexity and interdependency among stakeholders have resulted in the creation of many local tourism marketing alliances. The nature of their environments influences the domain over which they have authority. This paper uses a model describing the coverage, form, mode, and motivation of an alliance. A comparison of UK and USA alliances indicates that the domain of the latter are more constrained by the social, economic, and political environment in which they operate. Prescriptions for local tourism marketing alliances should not be made without understanding the needs of stakeholders and the constraints of their environments.

Trust, ethics and relationship satisfaction

The development of effective customer relationships is increasingly recognised as an important component of marketing strategies, particularly in the case of service industries. Developing and maintaining satisfactory customer relationships can help to reduce perceived risk, reduce transactions costs, increase customer loyalty and customer retention and thus impact on organisational performance. From the customer’s perspective, the determinants of relationship satisfaction are thought to include factors such as customer orientation, trust, length of relationship, expertise and ethics. Provides further evidence on the cognitive antecedents of relationship satisfaction based on evidence from the financial services sector.

Buyer‐seller relationships: A conceptual model and empirical investigation

Increasing emphasis is being placed by marketing managers on the need to build long‐term relationships between themselves and their customers. Analysis of long‐term buyer‐seller relationships has drawn heavily on the literature of social psychology, especially in making comparisons with family relationships. It has been proposed that buyer‐seller relationships go through some form of life‐cycle, paralleling cyclical relationships in other areas of human activity. However, models of the evolutionary development of buyer‐seller relationships have remained largely theoretical, with little empirical validation of the life cycle concept, or analysis of the changing composition of a relationship as it progresses through a life cycle. This paper provides cross‐sectional empirical evidence of the existence of a buyer‐seller relationship life cycle within the investment services sector. The elements that buyers perceive as being important in holding a relationship together are dependent on the duration to date of ...

Relationship marketing: a universal paradigm or management fad?

The business environment of the 1990s has seen a shift in firms’ emphasis away from recruiting new customers, towards nurturing and retaining those that they currently have. Numerous studies have demonstrated the effects on profitability of pursuing what has become known generically as “relationship marketing”. Discussion of relationship marketing has suffered from a failure to position the concept, resulting in interpretations ranging from short‐term sales incentives to a core business philosophy. Explores these multiple dimensions of relationship marketing, and challenges the emerging conventional wisdom that relational exchange between buyers and sellers should be the norm which all businesses aim for. Although relationship marketing may be very attractive for many products and markets, its adoption may be inappropriate in others. Parties to an exchange may have diverging views on commitment to each other and may not welcome the possibility of having their chances for opportunism restricted. In some sensitive markets, the cost of loyalty schemes may exceed the revenue benefits of repeated levels of business at profitable prices. Finally, the overenthusiastic development of buyer‐seller relationships can have anti‐ competitive implications, which are evident in some Eastern countries.

Linking external and internal relationship building in networks of public and private sector organizations: a case study

Observes that there has been considerable recent interest in evolving forms of network organizations, and notes the suggestion that organizations are developing increasingly fuzzy external boundaries as ongoing relationships with external subcontractors are developed. Identifies a number of network models that have been proposed which combine systems theory, resource dependency theory and strategic contingencies theory, but notes there has been little empirical analysis of the effects of an organization’s external relationships on its internal relationships, or vice versa. Summarizes briefly recent theoretical developments in the network literature and then reports on a case study analysis of a number of public‐private sector tourism marketing collaborative organizations. Looks at the reasons why public and private sector organizations collaborate to market a local tourism destination and the benefits that can be obtained from this process when compared to in‐house marketing. Concludes that the organizations studied had developed structures and processes which had the characteristics of an emerging network organization.

Relationship marketing: Local implementation of a universal concept

Relationship marketing has been described as a new paradigm for the study of exchange. However, current interest in developing relationship marketing programs overlooks the existence of relational exchange as the dominant form of exchange in many of the worlds economies. This paper discusses the nature of relational exchange and governance within a cross-cultural context and advises caution in the implementation of western style tactical relationship marketing activity in markets where relationships represent core cultural values.

Integrating brand development and relationship marketing

Relationship marketing has been hailed as a new marketing paradigm, replacing a transactional, warfare approach to exchange with a concern for ongoing mutually supportive buyer-seller relationships. There is evidence of firms increasingly using relationship marketing to gain competitive advantage, although there is great diversity in the means by which relationships are developed. Concurrent with the emergence of relationship marketing, the role of brand-building strategies is being questioned, as evidenced by an apparent increasing willingness of consumers to purchase generic products. This paper reviews the literature on brand and relationship development strategies, which have traditionally been seen as two separate streams of research. In a synthesis of the two streams, the complementarity and substitutability of the two is reviewed. Marketing planning can be facilitated by developing a framework for analysing the relative importance of the relationship needs and the brand needs of buyers of a product. Both relationship marketing and brand building contribute to the development of functional and emotional bonds between buyer and seller.

Relationship Marketing: Time to Enrich the Marketing Curriulum?:

Despite problems in defining relationship marketing, the subject is receiving increasing academic and practitioner attention. Instead of focusing on individual exchange transactions, students can benefit fiom a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of relationship marketing. Suggestions are made at a number of levels for including it in the marketing syllabus.

Franchised Degree Teaching What Can Educators Learn From Business

Abstract In order to achieve rapid growth in student numbers, a number of Higher Education Institutions have borrowed some of the concepts of franchising from the private service sector. A franchise involves one party — the franchisor — developing a service and monitoring standards, whilst a second party — the franchisee, delivers the service in return for a share of the reward. This article draws comparisons between private sector and higher education franchising and analyses the franchise strategies open to the HE sector. It concludes that if managed correctly, franchising will bring benefits to the higher education sector, colleges of further education and students alike. The uncertain start to higher education franchising mirrors the early days of private sector franchising, but like the latter, it has potential subsequently to achieve rapid mutually beneficial growth.

The Effects of Service Failure on Buyer-Seller Relationship Deterioration

Studies of relationship marketing have emphasized the processes by which relationships between buyers and sellers are initiated and developed. However, amidst evidence of a life-cycle in buyer-seller relationships (Dwyer, Schurr and Oh 1987; Palmer and Bejou 1994), relatively little attention has been paid to the processes by which relationships are dissolved. This paper reports on research into the effects of service failure on relationship dissolution.