بازاریابی ارتباطی (رابطه ای): با رویکرد دلفی (Delphi)

Over the past twenty years, relationship marketing has represented a renaissance in marketing and even a paradigmatic change according to some. The shift has had uncertain effects, however, and its applications have faced some serious challenges. Questions are being asked about the future of relationship marketing by both academics and businesspersons. To answer these questions, we have devised a Delphi-type predictive survey of twelve European marketing experts, with the aim of producing one view of potential changes that may occur by the year 2015. The present paper categorises this view into four major themes. It also details the managerial implications of one of the themes based on the following key points: “the experience at the heart of relational approaches”; “new data generation”; and “working together with communities”.

Relationship marketing or RM, the loosest and broadest definition of which is the sum total of marketing approaches focusing on the relationship between a business, its customers and its different stakeholders, came to the forefront of the marketing scene two decades ago. Several years later, RM had to share the spotlight with CRM, Customer Relationship Management, which is “the outcome of the continuing evolution and integration of marketing ideas and newly available data, technologies and organizations forms” (Boulding et al., 2005, p. 156). The advent of RM approaches marks a considerable change in the way marketing is considered and implemented. This change is still ongoing, however, with many managers questioning the future of these approaches. To apprehend an outline of RM’s future, we have set up a research programme revolving around the Delphi method. In the present article, we begin by detailing our research process before going on to summarize our main findings as regards RM representations in the year 2015. We finish with a discussion of three key points that are highly relevant to future management.

These Delphi survey findings result from the joint input of 12 experts interacting with four researchers. As such, the validity of this construction is dependent on the personal context in which these persons are embedded. The four European researchers made a policy choice to select only European experts so as to counterbalance a North-American dominant vision of (C)RM with a Pan-European representation thereof. This offers the benefit of an alternative view but also runs the risk of a limited vision. Yet a detailed overview of the sum total of the present findings reveals the advantages of, and need for, this kind of forecasting. It is important that researchers and practitioners supplement descriptive or explanatory approaches with prospective (as opposed to predictive) ones that can help to elucidate the future and illuminate researchers’ choices as well as corporate decisions. There is a need to reassure firms whose new approaches are predicated on investment choices. A prospective representation can inject meaning into their decisions and help them to produce a future that fits in harmoniously with whatever decisions they have taken. Thus, the many companies that have started to develop RM approaches that (as some experts envisage) strongly integrate consumption’s experiential and communal dimensions are helping to build up a RM that also meshes with the decisions they have taken. In other words, the four themes we came up with do not constitute RM’s future but instead provide a whole set of inter-subjective representations that researchers and managers can rely upon to build the RM of the future. It remains that one specific theme offers a clear way of enhancing the RM approach via greater employee participation (ethnography) and customer emotional bonding (community). Further research along these lines could be dedicated to investigating the extent to which companies can be expected to decrease their “management” of consumers and stakeholders to increasingly “meet them halfway” thanks to their empowered employees.