ABSTRACT
This chapter describes several approaches for understanding and managing the dynamics of customer–seller relationships. It focuses on managerial guidance for how to assess and diagnose relational dynamics to optimally design and continuously adapt relationship marketing strategies. The chapter provides the extant research insights into the dynamics of relationships and their implications for a dynamic approach to relationship marketing. It explores the findings pertaining to how relationships evolve over time, according to classic relationship life cycle assumptions, as well as more fine-grained concepts, such as relationship velocity, relationship state, and state migration approaches. The chapter explains some more disruptive relationship changes, as driven by transformational relationship events. A widespread but erroneous assumption about relationships, whether social or business, is that they follow smooth, foreseeable paths. In addition to determining the commitment velocity of their relationships, relationship managers need insights into how to increase it.
