Relationship Marketing in International Marketing/Sales Channels

Towards the conceptualization of relationship-based competitive advantages and a Relationship Management Balanced Scorecard

Master's Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: A, University of Bradford (TiasNimbas Business School), 130 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper intends to contribute to the increasing efforts to dissolve the confusions around relationship marketing (RM). In general, it is to provide evidence to the academic community how RM is operationalised in a to date under-researched setting (namely export channels), and generate practical suggestions to export managers how it may be applied more successfully. In this attempt, the paper reports of a study of relationships between brands (exporters) and international resellers (distributors) in the German sporting goods industry. The study investigated the nature and importance of RM instruments which exporting brands use to leverage relationships for achieving success in foreign markets. Assisting in the exploratory venture, the literature review has lead to the development of an export success model. It provided guidance to the author in his research and will enable the reader to appreciate and classify the research contributions. Finally, this work concludes with the application of the insights of the literature review and the study by proposing a practical management tool, the Export Relationship Management Balanced Scorecard (exRMBSc). It will enable managers and organizations to enhance their relationship management practice and thus helps to solve a frequent issue and crucial problems for many exporting businesses.