ABSTRACT
Relationship marketing is a popular topic in the marketing literature. Analysing the early literature, Coote (1994) identified three broad approaches to relationship marketing: the American approach (e.g. Berry, 1983; Jackson, 1985a; Levitt, 1983), the Nordic approach (e.g. Grönroos, 1989, 1990; Grönroos and Gummerson, 1985; Gummerson, 1987) and the Anglo-Australian approach (e.g. Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne, 1991). From these early works until now, thousands of papers and books have dealt with this issue from either a practical or a theoretical point of view. As an illustration, 3,861 references can be counted in the EBSCO database with the subject terms ‘relationship + marketing’.
