Evolving Relationship Marketing into a Discipline

Abstract

Abstract Relationship marketing is considered a paradigm change in both academic and practitioner literature. However, despite its popularity, relationship marketing has not yet evolved into becoming a discipline. The authors propose focus on eight areas to help relationship marketing evolve into a discipline. They compare the successful evolution of consumer behavior, services marketing and marketing strategy with the failure of international marketing, social marketing and business marketing as a discipline. Key Words: Relationship marketingrelationship marketing disciplinedomain to disciplinerelationship marketing theory