ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Reporting from the Netherlands, Nico Lemmens examines the concept of relationship marketing.

One of the most outstanding writers on the subject of service management, service quality and marketing is the Finnish academic Christian Grönroos. His book Service Management and Marketing – Customer Management in Service Competition is a must-read for anyone working in service industry in general and in cleaning industry in particular.

Some aspects of his thinking will be reviewed in this and future columns, as they are so relevant to cleaning services.

Since the 1970s the exchange of value (for example physical products) for money, has been considered the core phenomenon in marketing. According to this view marketing is planned and implemented to facilitate the exchange of products for money. This has often been labelled transaction marketing. The traditional marketing mix management and its well-known 4P’s are based on this.

Since the 1970s a new marketing approach has emerged based on the notion interactions between service providers and their customers – buyer-seller interactions – are important elements in marketing. The focus on interactions between supplier and customer, which in addition are often ongoing, makes it possible to view the customer not only as someone who from time to time buys from the firm, but as a relationship partner.

Relationships between parties and the interaction between them are considered the core phenomenon in marketing. Continuous purchases, and cross-sales opportunities, exchanges or transactions, follow from well-managed relationships. This is the relationship perspective as opposed to the exchange perspective.

All service processes lead to some form of cooperation between customer and service provider. In some cases the interactions take a short time (ordering theatre tickets over the internet), in other cases they will take a long time (restaurants, air transportation), or even a very long time (management consulting, coaching). If the emerging relationship is not satisfactory to the customer, the customer will turn to another provider. Although there are sometimes situations where the customer does not want the relationship to be emphasised, the important thing to keep in mind is that services are inherently relationship-oriented.

The traditional transactional mass marketing approach was successful for a long time after World War II. This approach to marketing may function well in situations where a firm needs new customers. However it loses its power when more markets are mature and oversupplied, and when new customers are more difficult to find, as certainly is the case in the Dutch market for cleaning services. It is increasingly important for a firm to keep its existing customers, even more so because in many businesses customers become profitable only after they have remained a customer for some time.

In future issues of ECJ we will go into some other aspects of service management inspired by Grönroos, such as the differences between the exchange and relationship perspectives, the management of customer relations, the nature of services and service consumption, quality management in services, service management principles, managing internal marketing, and managing service culture.