اعتماد و تمایلات مشتری برای ارائه اطلاعات در بازاریابی رابطه ای پایگاه داده محور

As organizations continue to embrace the concept of building customer relationships as a way of creating a competitive advantage, they seek to understand what makes a customer relationship successful. This article reports the results of a survey of consumers that explores one construct—trust in the organization—and its role in customers’ perception of their relationship with an organization. In addition, trust in the organization and its influence on customers’ willingness to provide the information necessary to help build a strong relationship is examined. The findings provide some support for the role of trust in building relationships, as well as identifying which factors are important in building that trust.

In today’s competitive business environment,more and more marketers are embracing a relationship marketing orientation, where the aim of the seller is to have a long-term, broad based relationship with the buyer in which the occurrence of a particular transaction is only a minor event in a long history. The goal is to gain loyal customers to whom a marketer can provide a variety of goods and services (Tomer,1998). Although conceptually appealing, marketers have been frustrated when faced with the task of implementing relationship marketing. An effective relationship in a marketing context suggests that consumers are willingly reducing their available market choices something marketers must give customers a good reason to do (Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995). A relationship by definition requires two-way interaction and communication. Thus marketers have to deter- mine how to create a dialogue and then how to maintain that dialogue so it is beneficial to both the marketer and the customer. Many marketers have turned to the database as the source for creating a dialogue and thus developing relationships with customers. The database, which at its core is a collection of information about customers, helps marketers identify customer needs, customer wants, and customer preferences that can then be better served in the long run. Through modeling, loyalty programs, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) programs, and some trial and error, the database marketer learns who his/her customers are and how best to communicate with them. The database, however, is only as good as the information it contains. Obtaining personal information about customers creates concerns for privacy and the potential for abuse of information by marketers. Customers have to feel comfortable enough with the marketer to reveal information, which in turn helps the marketer better serve the customer. One factor proposed as a potential driver of database-driven relationship marketing is trust (Milne, Rohm, & Boza, 1998). Customers must have feelings of trust toward the marketer before revealing information. Trust,however, may be a function of several related antecedent constructs including risk perception (Doney & Cannon, 1997), credibility (Gundlach, Achrol, & Mentzer, 1995), past experience (Rempel, Holmes, & Zanna,1985), reputation (Ganesan, 1994), and per- ceived dependability (Smith & Barclay, 1997). The purpose of this research is to look at the role of trust as a driver of database-driven relationship marketing in a consumer con- text. Sheth and Parvatiyar (1995) noted that although there has been a great deal of re- search on relationship marketing in a business context, very few studies have focused on relationship marketing with respect to consumer products. This work explores the rela- tive importance of a number of trust antecedents, identified in earlier research on trust and relationships, in formulating trust between consumers and the organization in a database relationship context. It then examines whether the establishment of trust drives customer perceptions of a relationship and customer willingness to provide information to a company for further database-driven relationship marketing efforts. As marketers better understand the importance and nature of trust in developing relationships, they can better serve customers and better respect customers’ concerns and rights to information privacy.

The findings from this study provide some support for the model proposed in Figure 1. Based on the premise that trust in the organization is a key to developing successful relationships with consumers in a database driven context, the model suggested that five factors acted as antecedents to developing that trust in an organization. This premise was tested based on consumers’ evaluation of the importance of the antecedents in a specific, self generated, mail order context. In this context, only two of the five antecedents to trust are significant in this model across industries, suggesting that trust in an organization may be more dependent on a company’s reputation and dependability than on the actual purchase situation. That is, consumers evaluate reputation and their perception of a company’s dependability when developing trust in that company. Thus, direct marketers wanting to establish a trust relation- ship with consumers would be best served emphasizing their reputation and dependability. Fortunately for marketers, both reputation and dependability are perceived by consumers as characteristics or attributes of a company and can be developed and maintained through strong communication efforts. Reputation can be enhanced through brand or image advertising in addition to strong word of mouth. Online marketers can attest to the importance of brand promotion and advertising to develop a reputation and perception of dependability to gain consumer trust. Creating and maintaining both reputation and dependability require more than just a good communication strategy, though. Marketers must be vigilant in protecting reputation and perceptions by providing excellence in customer service, product quality, fulfillment, and customer communication. The best developed communication strategy to build reputation can be rendered useless through poor fulfillment or customer service. Toys “R” Us learned this lesson during its entry online a few years ago when it could not fulfill orders in time for Christmas. Perhaps as interesting as the finding that reputation and dependability may be key to gaining consumer trust in a mail order context, is the finding that the remaining three proposed antecedents perceived risk, credibility, and past experience with the company were not significant in building trust. Perceived risk may not have been significant in forming trust in this study because the specific purchase context was not dictated. Respondents may have described less risky purchase scenarios for the study and thus, perceived risk was low. Perhaps consumers tend to avoid mail order purchases when perceived risk is high. This study would not have captured this information. Although past re- search identified perceived risk as key in developing trust, most research proposing this relationship was in the personal selling context. Consumers may save their high-risk purchases for personal selling situations. Credibility was also not a significant predictor of trust in the organization. This is a bit surprising considering it is more similar to reputation and perception of dependability in that companies can be pro active in developing credibility through communication strategy and credibility can be quickly erased through poor company performance. The credibility construct may not be as important in developing trust in the direct marketing context, even though it is consistently identified as an important element in trust and building relationships in a channels of distribution context. Perhaps in the channels context, where credibility has been most often tested as an element of trust, the discrepant power relations inherent in that context make credibility key to developing trust and relationships. In a mail order or direct marketing sales scenario, the power balance is not as disparate and therefore credibility less critical. That is, a consumer’s need to believe everything a marketer says is not as strong as a channel partner’s need to believe what other channel members say since the potential loss is great. It would be interesting to study the role of credibility of a company in a controlled, direct marketing scenario study where the consumer’s potential risk or loss is much greater. Finally, past experience with the company was not significant in building trust in a company.