Social Media’s Growing Influence on Relationship Marketing and Corporate Culture

The importance of Relationship Marketing (RM) to the success of corporations today cannot be denied. Many businesses, however, have not placed enough emphases on measuring the impact of customer relationships and taking into account the importance of customer service in the post-Recession world. The impact of instant social media reviews on business can be substantial. The rising popularity of websites like Yelp have given the post-Recession consumer, suspicious in general of banks and businesses, the power of an instant and widespread way to vocalize their feelings and opinions to other potential customers. Since customers can instantly share positive as well as negative reviews with other customers, businesses must carefully guard their reputation and image. To take a closer look at the future implications of relationship marketing, we will present and discuss the current literature. Additionally, we will examine a company that has a successful relationship marketing program, Apple. We will highlight how Apple has created effective customer service training to enhance the customer's experience. Apple's success in using positive word of mouth advertising instead of large, expensive advertising campaigns will also be explored. Key characteristics of Apple's achievement in relationship marketing will be highlighted. How few businesses seem to have a standardized process for establishing and implementing relationship marketing will be presented and analyzed. We will also review the power of relationship marketing in today's modern social media world and present reasons companies should seriously address relationship marketing. The need for businesses to measure RM in order to fully understand operational successes, failures, and impacts will be explored. To demonstrate one method for measuring RM, we will also perform a Delphi measurement to show standardized reflections of relationship marketing. The steps used and questions asked in the research method will be presented. Finally, the research findings are summarized and analyzed. Implications for reviewing and standardizing RM practices are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Developing Areas is the property of Tennessee State University, College of Business and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)