Total Relationship Marketing

by Evert Gummesson

This third edition of Total Relationship Marketing confirms it as a classic text on the subject of relationship marketing and CRM, areas which have become accepted - and debated - parts of marketing but are currently undergoing dramatic change.A major contribution to marketing thought internationally, this seminal title presents a powerful in-depth analysis of relational approaches to marketing where the three words relationships, networks and interaction are king. The book effects a dramatic shift in the fundamentals of marketing thought, with the author's refined model of thirty relationships, the 30Rs, presenting a sophisticated and cogent challenge to the traditional 4Ps schema. Previous editions were widely praised as breakthrough texts in the field, combining incisive and searching analysis with an accessible and pragmatic approach to putting the theory to work.This third edition is the first book on relationship marketing and CRM to integrate the ongoing evolution in marketing through the service-dominant logic, lean consumption and the customer's value chain, the augmented role of the customer in value creation, the increasing importance of customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction, network-based many-to-many marketing, and marketing accountability and metrics. It addresses both the high tech, information technology aspects of marketing and the high touch, human aspects. Further, customer-centricity is suggested to be broadened to balanced centricity, a trade-off between the needs of all stakeholders of a network of relationships. Examples, cases, concepts and references have been updated.Highly informative, practical in style and packed with illustrations from real companies, Total Relationship Marketing is an essential resource for all serious marketing practitioners as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Genres: Business

392 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 24, 1999

Reviews

[InvestingByTheBooks.com · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an over ten-year-old book on a subject – relationship marketing - that has grown in importance with the spreading of the Internet, e- commerce and of what’s become know as “big data”. Evert Gummesson is Professor Emeritus of Service Marketing and Management at the Stockholm Business School and the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK list him as one of the 50 most important contributors to the development of marketing. I fully agree with the thesis of the book, several of the topics described are interesting and to top it off, Philip Kotler is one of those endorsing the book. Still, I don’t like it.

The author’s aim is to point to the faulty premise that the 4Ps of the Marketing Mix constitute The General Theory of marketing. Despite mainly being targeted at mass marketing of standardized consumer goods the quartet of Product, Price, Promotion and Place dominates the teachings of marketing all over the world. When it comes to marketing of services, of B2B-products, less standardized products or even online sales, the Marketing Mix is not as applicable. Instead the real world focus of the marketing effort shifts to relationships, networks, co-operation etc. At the very end of the book the author states that he aims to right this faulty premise by initiating the development of a new general theory of marketing.

The attempt results in “30Rs”, that is thirty relationships. One after one Gummesson lists a number of relations that affect the company. He then discusses a number of more or less loosely related topics to this relationship tying in various aspects of interactions and collaborations and moves on to the next relation. This makes a very odd book since many of the relationships listed are very far off from what is normally thought of as marketing. Some more exotic examples can be the legal relationship, the criminal relationship, the relationship to knowledge and governmental agreements in international organizations like WTO. Agreed, business is dominated and built on interactions between people, but does this mean that all relations that in some way affect business is marketing? My answer would be no. If a business concept becomes broad enough to encompass everything it looses its meaning.

The text wonders from one topic to another without real structure and without giving much practical advice on how to use the relationships to market goods or services. The problem is that marketing is a very practical discipline. Its purpose is to sell stuff. This I don’t know how to use. The commentary around the relationships is also full of rather personal opinions on everything from genetically modified food, the inability of financial accounting to measure what’s important, the evils of stock brokers and god knows what. Only at the very end of the book an attempt to build a theoretical foundation is made, leaving the reader more confused than necessary until the last chapters.
I fully believe that in relationship marketing the service or product is only half the quality of the product. The other half of the quality is built on character, honesty, transparency, authenticity, fairness etc. – that is on relationship. The problem is that the lack of structure and logic leaves the reader abandoned. The author even admits that he himself was troubled by failing to find a uniting logic to all the relationships – until he realized that this search for logic was misguided as there is nothing to say that the relationships should let themselves be subsumed into existing thought patterns.

Interesting subject, wrong book.