Commercial and Interpersonal Relationships; Using the Structure of Interpersonal Relationships to Understand Individual-to-Individual, Individual-to-Firm, and Firm-to-Firm Relationships in Commerce

Abstract

Marketers have conceptualized relationships in many commercial settings, whether business marketing (i.e., business-to-business), services marketing (i.e., service provider-to-client), or consumer marketing (i.e., business-to-consumer). In this paper, we examine the extent to which marketing researchers might leverage that which is known about interpersonal relationships to understand the structure and characteristics of commercial dyads. We find strong support of a relationship paradigm in considering marketing phenomena in the context of commercial dyads, but different 'levels' of relational dyads are characterized by different relational dimensions.

Keywords: Relationships, Relationship marketing, Dyads, Correspondence analysis