Relationship marketing has received much attention and widespread publicity over the past ten years and has moved to the forefront of research and practice. It provides companies with a management tool to establish economically profitable relationships, networks and interactions with different, but equally important stakeholder markets. The marketing concept as reflected in the four P's of the marketing mix was prominent in marketing practice and thinking until the mid-1980s, when reference to customer relationships and relationship building began to appear in the literature and became the focus of much research. The marketing concept, although still relevant, was expanded to include the dimension of relationships. The shift fiom transactional to relationship-based marketing has many implications for product and service based business. Marketing can no longer be viewed as a separate function to which an organisation can assign responsibility for the customer while the rest of the organisation gets on with their tasks. Rather, the relationship-based view of marketing places the responsibility for marketing (as defined broadly) on everyone in the organisation. In other words, it is the responsibility of every employee within the organisation to satisfy the needs of customers. A relationship marketing orientation can therefore create a competitive edge for an organisation and can also have a positive impact on organisational performance. In a highly competitive, global environment organisations are focussing more attention on building sustainable, competitive advantages by developing and maintaining close, cooperative relationships with a limited set of suppliers, customers and channel members. Through these relationships, organisations create value by differentiating their offering and/or lowering their costs. The term "relationship marketing" is therefore applied to a number of different marketing activities ranging from consumer frequency marketing programs to selling activities directed towards building partnerships with key customers. The focus of this study is to investigate the mutually beneficial nature of establishing long term relationships in supplier markets, customer markets, internal markets, recruitment markets, internal markets and influence markets. The different principles which are important to improve and professionally manage the relationships in the markets listed above, are identified and discussed. These principles were tested in travel agencies in the Western Cape province to determine their current and ideal application in a travel and tourism environment. The calculation of effect sizes were based on the difference between the current and ideal application of the principles within travel agencies in the Western Cape. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Business Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Our connections to the digital world are invoked by brands, but the intersection of branding and interaction design is still an under-investigated area. Particularly, current websites are designed not only to support essential user tasks, but also to communicate an institution's intended brand values and traits. What we do not yet know, however, is which design factors affect which aspect of a brand. To demystify this issue, three sub-projects were conducted. The first project developed a systematic approach for evaluating the branding effectiveness of content-intensive websites (BREW). BREW gauges users' brand perceptions on four well-known branding constructs: brand as product, brand as organization, user image, and brand as person. It also provides rich guidelines for eBranding researchers in regard to planning and executing a user study and making improvement recommendations based on the study results. The second project offered a standardized perceived usability questionnaire entitled DEEP (design-oriented evaluation of perceived web usability). DEEP captures the perceived website usability on five design-oriented dimensions: content, information architecture, navigation, layout consistency, and visual guidance. While existing questionnaires assess more holistic concepts, such as ease-of-use and learnability, DEEP can more transparently reveal where the problem actually lies. Moreover, DEEP suggests that the two most critical and reliable usability dimensions are interface consistency and visual guidance. Capitalizing on the BREW approach and the findings from DEEP, a controlled experiment (N=261) was conducted by manipulating interface consistency and visual guidance of an anonymized university website to see how these variables may affect the university's image. Unexpectedly, consistency did not significantly predict brand image, while the effect of visual guidance on brand perception showed a remarkable gender difference. When visual guidance was significantly worsened, females became much less satisfied with the university in terms of brand as product (e.g., teaching and research quality) and user image (e.g., students' characteristics). In contrast, males' perceptions of the university's brand image stayed the same in most circumstances. The reason for this gender difference was revealed through a further path analysis and a follow-up interview, which inspired new research directions to unpack even more the nexus between branding and interaction design.