Commercial and Interpersonal Relationships; Using the Structure of Interpersonal Relationships to Understand Individual-to-Individual, Individual-to-Firm, and Firm-to-Firm Relationships in Commerce

Marketers have conceptualized relationships in many commercial settings, whether business marketing (i.e., business-to-business), services marketing (i.e., service provider-to-client), or consumer marketing (i.e., business-to-consumer). In this paper, we examine the extent to which marketing researchers might leverage that which is known about interpersonal relationships to understand the structure and characteristics of commercial dyads. We find strong support of a relationship paradigm in considering marketing phenomena in the context of commercial dyads, but different 'levels' of relational dyads are characterized by different relational dimensions.

[1]  Charles L. Martin,et al.  Historical, Descriptive and Strategic Perspectives on the Construct of Product Commitment , 1991 .

[2]  Jerald Hage,et al.  The Organization of Role-Relationships: A Systematic Description , 1970 .

[3]  L. C. Leonidou.  Behavioural Aspects of the Exporter‐Importer Relationship: The Case of Cypriot Exporters and British Importers , 1989 .

[4]  M. Deutsch,et al.  Perceived dimensions of interpersonal relations. , 1976 .

[5]  John A. Czepiel,et al.  A role theory perspective on dyadic interactions: The service encounter. , 1985 .

[6]  H. Law.  Research methods for multimode data analysis , 1984 .

[7]  John F. Padgett,et al.  Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434 , 1993, American Journal of Sociology.

[8]  Jan B. Heide,et al.  Do Norms Matter in Marketing Relationships? , 1992 .

[9]  Amy L. Ostrom,et al.  Gender differences in the impact of core and relational aspects of services on the evaluation of service encounters , 1993 .

[10]  Mark S. Granovetter.  Network Sampling: Some First Steps , 1976, American Journal of Sociology.

[11]  Denise M. Rousseau,et al.  Developing an interdisciplinary science of organizations , 1979 .

[12]  Roel Bosker,et al.  Standard Errors and Sample Sizes for Two-Level Research , 1993 .

[13]  L. Shetzer,et al.  A Social Information Processing Model of Employee Participation , 1993 .

[14]  B. Everitt,et al.  Three-Mode Principal Component Analysis. , 1986 .

[15]  L. Buchanan.  Vertical Trade Relationships: The Role of Dependence and Symmetry in Attaining Organizational Goals , 1992 .

[16]  Paul E. Green,et al.  Comparing Interpoint Distances in Correspondence Analysis: A Clarification , 1987 .

[17]  Lawrence A. Crosby,et al.  Relationship Quality in Services Selling: An Interpersonal Influence Perspective: , 1990 .

[18]  Lawrence A. Crosby,et al.  Effects of Relationship Marketing on Satisfaction, Retention, and Prices in the Life Insurance Industry , 1987 .

[19]  Michael Etgar,et al.  Channel Domination and Countervailing Power in Distributive Channels , 1976 .

[20]  Raymond B. Cattell,et al.  The principal trait clusters for describing personality. , 1945 .

[21]  R. Darrell Bock,et al.  Multilevel analysis of educational data , 1989 .

[22]  S. Levy,et al.  Broadening the concept of marketing. , 1969, Journal of marketing.

[23]  L. Berry,et al.  Emerging perspectives on services marketing , 1983 .

[24]  Louis Guttman,et al.  An Outline of Some New Methodology for Social Research , 1954 .

[25]  G. Āllport.  The general and the unique in psychological science. , 1962, Journal of personality.

[26]  Lars-Erik Gadde,et al.  Stability and change in network relationships , 1987 .

[27]  Gary L. Lilien,et al.  Research Traditions in Marketing , 1994 .

[28]  Alan Page Fiske,et al.  Implicit relationship prototypes: Investigating five theories of the cognitive organization of social relationships , 1992 .

[29]  D. Ford.  The Development of Buyer‐Seller Relationships in Industrial Markets , 1980 .

[30]  Mark S. Granovetter.  The Strength of Weak Ties , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[31]  James A. Narus,et al.  A Model of Distributor Firm and Manufacturer Firm Working Partnerships , 1990 .

[32]  Wesley J. Johnston,et al.  Relationship management: Managing the selling and the buying interface , 1986 .

[33]  J. Carroll,et al.  Interpoint Distance Comparisons in Correspondence Analysis , 1986 .

[34]  Amy L. Ostrom,et al.  Consumer Trade-Offs and the Evaluation of Services , 1995 .

[35]  A. Agresti,et al.  Multiway Data Analysis , 1989 .

[36]  Robert E. Spekman,et al.  A Strategic Approach to Managing Buyer‐Seller Relationships , 1991 .

[37]  L. Hallén,et al.  Interfirm Adaptation in Business Relationships , 1991 .

[38]  Benjamin S. Bloom,et al.  Methods in Personality Assessment , 1957 .

[39]  R. Bagozzi.  Marketing as Exchange , 1975 .

[40]  Timothy Leary,et al.  Interpersonal diagnosis of personality , 1957 .

[41]  G. Fletcher,et al.  Cognition in Close Relationships , 1992 .

[42]  U. Foa,et al.  Convergences in the analysis of the structure of interpersonal behavior. , 1961, Psychological review.

[43]  Alice M. Tybout,et al.  Confirmatory Versus Comparative Approaches to Judging Theory Tests , 1987 .

[44]  R. J. Berling.  The emerging approach to business strategy: Building a relationship advantage , 1993 .

[45]  Evert Gummesson,et al.  Broadening and Specifying Relationship Marketing , 1994 .

[46]  M. T. Cunningham,et al.  Managing customer relationships. The challenge of deploying scarce managerial resources , 1985 .

[47]  S. Knox,et al.  Retail Buyers and their Fresh Produce Suppliers: A Power or Dependency Scenario in the UK? , 1991 .

[48]  H. Kelley.  Personal Relationships: Their Structures and Processes , 1979 .

[49]  L. Tucker,et al.  Some mathematical notes on three-mode factor analysis , 1966, Psychometrika.

[50]  G. Kelly.  A theory of personality , 1963 .

[51]  Trevor Hastie,et al.  The Geometric Interpretation of Correspondence Analysis , 1987 .

[52]  Lars-Gunnar Mattsson,et al.  The Markets-As-Networks Tradition in Sweden , 1994 .

[53]  M Wish,et al.  Comparisons Among Multidimensional Structures Of Interpersonal Relations. , 1976, Multivariate behavioral research.

[54]  George R. Franke,et al.  Correspondence Analysis: Graphical Representation of Categorical Data in Marketing Research , 1986 .

[55]  Peter M. Blau,et al.  Multilevel structural analysis , 1993 .

[56]  Barton A. Weitz,et al.  Resource Allocation Behavior in Conventional Channels , 1987 .

[57]  Seymour Rosenberg,et al.  Structural Representations of Implicit Personality Theory1 , 1972 .

[58]  R. Thomas.  Causal vs. attributional measurement of interpersonal purchase influence in organizations , 1989 .

[59]  G. Zaltman,et al.  Factors affecting trust in market research relationships. , 1993 .

[60]  Frank M. Bass,et al.  Pooling Issues and Methods in Regression Analysis with Examples in Marketing Research , 1975 .

[61]  Anthony S. Bryk,et al.  QUANTITATIVE MODELS FOR ESTIMATING TEACHER AND SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS11Research reported here was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. , 1989 .

[62]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  Levels of Analysis and Effects: Clarifying Group Influence and Climate by Separating Individual and Group Effects , 1990 .

[63]  D. Iacobucci,et al.  Modeling Dyadic Interactions and Networks in Marketing , 1992 .

[64]  F. Dwyer,et al.  Developing Buyer-Seller Relationships: , 1987 .