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After briefly reviewing the origins of Relationship Marketing, and highlighting the prevalence of studies taking a practitioner viewpoint, this paper justifies the benefits in adopting a customer perspective
for further RM fieldwork. Acknowledging the low level of conceptual and theoretical development in RM, it argues in favour of the application of qualitative methods in general and focus groups in particular.
The main body of the paper discusses customer-respondent usage of metaphor and anthropomorphisms, drawing on the data from 20 focus groups with customers of 10 prominent firms operating in the East Midlands
region of the UK. The paper presents a typology of the metaphors used, and analyses customer anthropomorphism of the firm's gender, distinguishing features and most importantly, their analogies of its relationship
to them. The paper concludes that the majority of the metaphors imply a customer perspective on relationships with firms as being confrontational and competitive, rather than mutually beneficial and finishes
by discussing the implications of this and the customer perception of their relationships with firms for the academy and practitioners.
Keywords: ANTHROPOMORPHISM; FOCUS GROUPS; METAPHOR; RELATIONSHIP MARKETING
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 June 2002
- From 2022, the home of readable radical research. Focussing on the fields of marketing, branding and customer/consumer behaviour, jcb publishes poems, short stories, opinion pieces and articles with attitude.
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