ABSTRACT

In Chapter 3 of this book, Johanson and Wootz argue that ‘the basic idea behind the IMP project is that industrial marketing is very much a matter of the establishment and development of customer relationships’. A great deal of attention is certainly devoted to this issue in the preceding country chapters, in spite of the different perspective that each author has adopted. However, the idea of the management of customer relationships does not usually appear as such in traditional industrial marketing textbooks. Indeed, the marketing mix framework, which is the most frequently used framework in marketing textbooks, does not allow for such a perspective. The marketing mix concept merely enumerates a set of strategic and operational areas within which decision making takes place. For instance for Haas (1976), the various areas to be considered are: Product Strategy, Channel Strategy, Personal Selling, Pricing Strategy, Advertising and Sales Promotion.