It was just yesterday that I started talking about "Relationship Marketing" to my B2B – Organizational Marketing class. Naturally, this is huge for business today.What with CRM on the front end and Supply Chain management software at the upstream of B2B relationships trying to keep things on track in the complex world of global B2B.
Relationship marketing and purchasing takes its theoretical cue from sociologists who argue that marriage and long term commitment (see Dwyer,Schurr and Oh 1987) are superior to single transactions for certain products and services. A topic such as this seemed even more relevant just before Valentine’s day.
One rather interesting development that has happened is the decline of online dating on the eve of this second most important greeting card day ( after Christmas). Bob Sullivan of the Red Tape Chronicles quotes Nate Elliot of Jupiter Research to conclude that 22 million people in the US are single and looking but are not willing to try an online dating site. What an intriguing technology adoption problem! Elliot concludes that these people will probably never use the online dating services which incidentally are quite profitable.
Then, I read about the anti-Valentine day movement which includes greeting cards and a substantial blog buzz on why Valentines’ day is no good.
The Valentine day festival has really taken off in many countries particularly in Asia. Apparently, in Japan ladies have to buy chocolates for the entire office, in India there is a huge greeting products boom and so it is in South East Asia and China. In any event, Valentine day makes things cheerful, particularly today in the North East US which has been otherwise icy and dreary. Happy Valentines day to all readers!