Abstract
Relationship marketing—establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges—constitutes a major shift in marketing theory and practice. After conceptualizing relationship marketing and discussing its ten forms, the authors (1) theorize that successful relationship marketing requires relationship commitment and trust, (2) model relationship commitment and trust as key mediating variables, (3) test this key mediating variable model using data from automobile tire retailers, and (4) compare their model with a rival that does not allow relationship commitment and trust to function as mediating variables. Given the favorable test results for the key mediating variable model, suggestions for further explicating and testing it are offered.
Keywords
Relationship marketingKey (lock)MarketingBusinessStructural equation modelingTest (biology)Variable (mathematics)Function (biology)Marketing managementComputer scienceMathematics
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
Underlying Dimensions and Communications Strategies of the Advertising Agency-Client Relationship
Borrowing concepts from both services and industrial marketing, this paper examines the advertising agency-client relationship, revealing that active relationship management tod...
A bibliometric retrospection of marketing from the lens of psychology: Insights from <i>Psychology & Marketing</i>
Abstract The contribution of psychology to marketing has been significant and invaluable. No discipline has benefitted from another as much as marketing from psychology. To gain...
“Paradigms Lost”: On Theory and Method in Research in Marketing
Only recently have marketing scientists become concerned with issues in the philosophy of science. This paper points to one neglected area—the implications of a theoretical trad...
Is Science Marketing?
Science is analyzed as a special case of marketing—the marketing of ideas in the form of substantive and methodological theories. The marketing mix, target markets, and marketin...
Information Technology, Incentives, and the Optimal Number of Suppliers
:Buyers are transfonning their relationships with suppliers. For example, instead of playing off dozens or even hundreds of competing suppliers against one another, many finns a...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1994
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 20-38
- Citations
- 10099
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
10099
OpenAlex
Cite This
Robert M. Morgan,
Shelby D. Hunt
(1994).
The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing.
Journal of Marketing
, 58
(3)
, 20-38.
https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299405800302
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1177/002224299405800302