Sustained Customer Relationships In The Business Market Mechanism

As the competitive pressure is increasing and the seller-market is transiting into the buyer-market, the customers' attitudes and behaviors play an important role during the enterprise's development So, it is necessary for the enterprise how to make and maintain the good customer relationships needs to be considered from the strategy perspective in order to strengthen the survival and developing competence (Haugland, 1999; Eriksson, Vaghult, 2000). How to maintain the customer relationships has been already considered. The current papers on the customer relationships' continuance focused either on the customer satisfaction or the customer loyalty, but the customer satisfaction or the customer loyalty didn't tell us the mechanisms of the customer relationship' continuance. Also the papers didn't explore completely the essence of the customer relationship's continuance (Henning etc., 1997; Torsten etc., 2001). Further, the effects that the enterprise designs and carry on the various strategies make on the customer relationship's continuance still need a lot of empirical studies, and evidences that the enterprise should carry on what strategies are still absented (Beatty etc., 1996; Bendapudi, Berry, 1997; Christy etc., 1996; Fournie, 1998; Gwinner, Gremler, Bitner, 1998). Finally, the research on the customer relationship are almost from the seller's perspective, the buyer's perspective is badly neglected (Singh, Sirdeshmuch, 2000; Odekerken-Schroder, 1999). So, based on the previous papers and employed the empirical research approach, this paper tried to explore the mechanism of the customer relationship's continuance from the buyer's perspective.The customer relationship's continuance on the one hand correlates closely with the strategies the enterprise designs and carries on, on the other hand, it correlates closely with the motivations of the customer that maintain the customer relationship. So the problems that this paper would solve include three sub-questions:(1) Research on the essence of the customer re I at i onsh i p' s cont i nuance from the viewpoint of the customerIf exploring the mechanism of the customer relationship's continuance from the buyer's perspective, we have to answer "what is the essence of the customer relationship's continuance?" That is, we firstly study the "why". In order to solve this question, we have to solve the following sub-questions: what are the dimensions of the customer relationship? What are the motivations of the customer that maintain the customer relationship? Because the satisfactory theory and the loyalty theory couldn'tanswer these questions successfully, the new perspective from the exchange theory should be employed.(2) Explores the enterprise' s relational maintaining strategies from the customer perspectiveIn practice, the enterprise always carries out the various relational maintaining strategies consciously or unconsciously in order to make its customer relationships. But how does the customer recognize and value these strategies and its effects? These problems are very important because the enterprise can grasp the essence of designing the relational maintaining strategies if these problems can be solved. This paper solved them by bringing forward the notions of the relational maintaining strategies.(3) Research on effects of the enterprise' s relational maintaining strategies on the customer relationship' s continuanceWhen the essence of customer relationship's continuance and the Driving-Strategy-Orientation (DSO) are solved, an following problem is: how the Perceived Driving-Strategy-Orientation (PDSO) influences customer commitment directly and indirectly? It is the last problem this paper will study.Based on the various previous paper and academic analysis, this paper points out the continuing model of the customer relationship starting from the customer relationships in the construction material market. After interviewing 16 enterprises, we carried out random sample surveys in the selected regions came from Zhejia...