Nermin Eyuboglu & Andreas Buja
Executive Summary
In the past two decades, there has been a shift from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented marketing. Marketers have been realizing that retaining partners and customers is often more economical than attracting new ones. Therefore, building and maintaining long-lasting relationships has become a focus of contemporary marketing practice and the subject of research in marketing.
However, not all relationships survive. Recent literature reports failure rates for relationships in excess of 50% at the initial stages. In general, failure is not random; rather, it is often systematic and driven by identifiable causes. This observation is the starting point for a Darwinian line of thinking, the topic of the current article.
In a Darwinian interpretation of marketing relationships, failure and survival are the elements of "selection." In marketing, the process of selection is driven by at least three fundamental factors: (1) conduct of the partners, which may include unilateral impositions and bilateral practices; (2) dependence of the partners on each other; and (3) external adversities from the markets.
Selection has the effect of culling relationships with certain combinations of these factors. For example, if a party attempts unilateral impositions when the partner is not dependent, the relationship is put at risk. For another example, if a party can and does use unilateral impositions, and if it fails to compensate with bilateral reassurance, the relationship is again put at risk. In both cases, the partner is likely to abandon the relationship as soon as opportunity arises.
When certain patterns between relationship-affecting factors are preferred by selection, these patterns can be interpreted as "adaptations." The practical implication is that if partners shape their conduct according to these patterns, they may enhance the longevity of the relationship.
Darwinian selection applies to all types of marketing relationships in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. Examples include all relationships in the supply chain, between service providers and customers, and between sales representatives and customers.
Biography
Nermin Eyuboglu is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College. She holds a PhD in Marketing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her areas of expertise include marketing channel strategy, interorganizational relationships in the supply chain, measure development and assessment, and negotiations. Her work appeared in Journal of Marketing, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Psychology and Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Channels, among others. She has won several teaching awards, as well as an honorable mention in one of the Marketing Science Institute's doctoral dissertation proposal competitions.
Andreas Buja received his PhD in 1980 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. After postdoctoral work at the Children's Hospital in Zurich and a visiting position at Stanford University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, he became an assistant professor and associate professor at the University of Washington. In 1987, after a short stint at Salomon Brothers, he moved to Bellcore in New Jersey, followed by AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1994 and AT&T Labs in 1995. In 2002, he became a full professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received an endowed chair in 2004. Andreas Buja is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. His interests have been in data visualization, multivariate analysis, and, more recently, in machine learning. He is currently pursuing research in network visualization and ensemble methods for classification and regression.
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 71, No. 4, October 2007
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