The dating/courtship/marriage analogy has been used for many years to describe the progression of a relationship between a customer and a brand. While academics periodically criticise this comparison, practitioners find it a useful device for conceptualising the goals of relationship marketing.

Roughly speaking, the idea is to first capture a share of the customer’s business (dating), then to become the preferred brand (courtship), and then to become the only brand (marriage). By coaxing customers along this progression, the marketer is able to increase a customer’s lifetime value to the company.

The marriage analogy parallels the idea that the customer-brand bond can be arrayed along a continuum from transactions to close relationships. Here’s an interesting cocktail conversation: Try to think of pure commercial transactions that involve no relationship. The closest I can remember hearing was the following:

You are driving along an interstate highway and discover you need gas. You pull into an unbranded gas station, use the self-service pump, fill up with unleaded, pay by cash without exchanging a word with the attendant, and you drive away with no intention of ever returning again.

The implication is that most commercial exchanges probably involve some level of relationship. Therefore, the real continuum is probably between low-commitment exchanges (dating around) and close relationships (marriage).

Concepts of relationship marketing
The principles of relationship marketing began to be crafted around 1985. There has been a lot written about this topic since. A few of the the key concepts are:

• Not every customer wants a close relationship with the company nor does the company want a close relationship with every customer. From the company’s perspective, this usually means segmenting the market and focusing on high-potential customers.
• Certain business contexts are more conducive to relationship formation, such as complex purchases involving high uncertainty and risk. B2B buying situations often fit this profile. A good B2C example is life insurance.  Because policies are hard to evaluate, consumers tend to rely on a personal relationship with the agent.
• Relationships afford the company a wide variety of economic benefits such as higher share of wallet, reduced defection, enhanced cross sales, more referrals, etc.
• For the progression to take place, both the buyer and seller need to “invest” in the relationship. These investments can take many forms. For example, when a computer user invests time and effort to really learn the ins-and-outs of Microsoft’s Vista, they are less inclined to switch operating systems. The company’s investments are often in the form of customisation (made-to-order shoes) and reciprocity (airline reward programmes).
• One-to-one marketing approaches can facilitate relationship formation and maintenance. For example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems allow the company to adapt sales and services to the needs of the individual customer.

 
It is common for companies to measure the relationship propensity of their customers. These measures go by a variety of names but one of the most popular is a Customer Loyalty Index (CLI). Typically, customers are asked in surveys a series of behavioural intention questions to gauge their willingness to remain a customer and more deeply engage with the brand. Their responses are indexed together in some fashion and then aggregated across a sample of customers to provide a trackable scorecard metric. Through further statistical modelling of the survey data, companies can learn what influences the relationship propensity scores. This research may reveal whether loyalty is more rationally or emotionally driven. Likewise, it is possible to tell which customer experience areas are having the most impact on the relationship.

Pushing the analogy further
Returning to the marriage analogy, it is important to recognise the role of “alternative partners” and how this can change as the relationship progresses. At the casual dating stage, there may be many romantic options from which to choose (assuming the individual is attractive enough!). At the courtship stage, the list of candidates narrows dramatically and there is now one, heavily preferred option. If one is contemplating marriage, this is a period of intense scrutiny and evaluation to determine if the preferred option is indeed the right choice as a life partner. If the evaluation is favourable and marriage follows, a commitment is made to discard all other options and stick with the one chosen partner indefinitely (“Til Death Do Us Part”).

The relationship progression model dovetails nicely with comprehensive theories of buyer behaviour with their familiar stages of problem recognition, motivated search, alternatives evaluation and choice. Of course, consumers do not always follow those stages but are more likely to do so in contexts favourable to relationship formation.
Of course as divorce statistics indicate, marriage relationships are not always forever. At the risk of being simplistic, they may crumble from the inside and/or be pulled apart from the outside. If one or both parties’ needs are not being met in the relationship, the resulting dissatisfaction can drive the parties apart and possibly into someone else’s arms! Occasionally, one party’s chance encounter with another who is just so appealing (finally found the “love of my life”) may precipitate the end of marriage.

Again we see obvious parallels with buyer behaviour. Even without a stable of alternatives to consider, the failure of products and services to meet customers’ expectations often leads to relationship dissatisfaction. The theories say that such dissatisfaction is likely to put the customer back in a motivated search of alternatives. The consideration set re-expands; trial behaviour may occur, resulting in a loss of share-of-wallet or eventually outright defection. An example might be a distance runner whose favourite brand of running shoes no longer has the durability the runner had come to expect. This product dissatisfaction then motivates the runner, despite having been a long-time loyalist to the incumbent brand, to shop for other brands and potentially change his/her allegiance.

The commercial analogy to the “finally found the love of my life syndrome” is when a new or unchosen brand innovates in such a significant way that it captures the customers’ attention and causes them to question their current brand choice.
 
So what?
While the marriage model is interesting to think about in a commercial marketing context, it only has value to the extent that it improves business decision-making. The key decisions are with respect to the measurement and management of customer relationships.

Let’s start with measurement.  It seems clear that when most existing or potential customers are in the mode of “dating around”, it is imperative to have a measurement system that assesses the relative appeal of the entire consideration set. I call this the “Gravitational Pull of the Planets Model,” the idea being that the brands with the most gravitational pull (i.e. affective appeal) are going to get the largest shares of the customers’ business.  So it is not possible to fully explain how customers allocate their shares without attempting to gauge all (or at least the most powerful) gravitational forces acting on the customer.  Brand equity research has typically had this characteristic of assessing relative appeal. Perhaps that is why it has proven so popular over the years in multi-alternative consumer choice situations involving frequent transactions, generally low-switching barriers, and generally low risk. Examples include just about any FMCG category.

In situations where most customers want a relationship and are in the courtship or marriage stages, it is imperative to have a measurement system that is highly informative about the processes of relationship formation, maintenance and expansion. I might call this the “Centre of the Universe Model,” implying that we want to understand as much as we can about the customer’s relationship with their preferred or only brand. In this case, some metric around relationship propensity (a.k.a. loyalty or engagement) seems to be in order. Components of the metric can relate to advocacy, retention, expansion and compliance. Perhaps for these reasons, relationship measurements have proven highly popular in B2B settings, consumer financial services, limited choice markets like utilities and telecom, healthcare, and durables.

Management-wise, the marriage analogy certainly admonishes the relationship marketers to pick their customers carefully. Generally, acustomised (even mass customised) product or service is more costly to produce than a standardised one. It may not be economically feasible to make this kind of relationship investment across the entire sweep of potential customers.  So segmentation is the name of the game. For example, a manufacturer of custom fitted golf clubs like Ping really needs to understand the market for these clubs in terms of skill levels, price points, channels used, etc. If a customer group really doesn’t care about individual customisation, then providing this service to them represents wasted investment.

Just as in marriage, emotions loom large in commercial relationship contexts. There are several reasons for that. Often the product or service is high in credence properties (i.e. quality can’t be easily judged in advance), so trust in the brand and its representatives becomes a critical factor. The Mayo Clinic understands this and does everything possible to build client trust and confidence.

Since relationships are by definition a two-way-street, customers (just like the company) are often required to make some level of investment in the relationship that goes beyond the price paid. They are concerned about protecting that investment and not being taken advantage of. As one example, consider the many times that you as a customer are asked to make a relationship investment in terms of the disclosure of personal information. How do you know that you can trust the brand with that information? A lot may depend on your assessment of the values of the brand and the degree to which those values overlap with your own.

So the careful management of corporate reputation is a critical issue. Also critical from the standpoint of trust is the clarity of the brand promise in terms of its uniqueness, personal relevance, authenticity and consistent delivery across all of the customer experience areas. Bad things can happen when corporate ethics clash with the brand promise. Consider the case of Whole Foods CEO Jon Mackey who in 2007 was embroiled in a controversy regarding his anonymous Yahoo! internet posting. This certainly flew in the face of the Whole Foods brand promise concerning its social conscience.

The goals of relationship marketing are today being advanced through the widespread adoption of Customer Experience Management (CEM). This holistic and integrated management approach has at its core the notion of engaging customers both emotionally and behaviourally. Although originating largely in the retail and service sectors, CEM principles are being more widely applied even in FMCG (causing those marketers to rethink how far they might actually go along the relationship continuum). CEM strives, on the one hand, to create emotional hooks with customers by offering a distinctive customer experience. For example, take Cabela’s sporting goods stores which have become the Disneyland of hunting and fishing, with live fish tanks, antique gun collections, recreated outdoor scenes and mounted game of every species. CEM also seeks to behaviourally involve customers with the brand as a means of deepening the relationship. This can span all forms of activity from participating in events, joining blogs, having memberships, serving on customer councils and participating in referral programmes.

To sum up, the marriage analogy continues to have utility for marketers to help understand how to manage closer relationships with customers, while at the same time recognising that relationship marketing is not always called for. Commercial relationships, like romantic relationships, have a big emotional dimension that revolves around the concept of trust. The focus of relationship marketing today is the clever matching of customer expectations and experiences as a means of inducing customers to tie the knot.