China's Industrial Enterprise Customer Relationship Marketing Research

Customer relationship marketing has aroused lots of academic interests in the past two decades. A great number of research results have indicated that companies could achieve sustainable competitive advantages through relationship marketing. As a result, Companies have begun to implement a series of customer relationship marketing strategies, emphasizing on the establishment and retention of long-term relationship between the buyers and sellers. One of the fundamental issues of customer relationship marketing is to understand the relationship between relationship quality and relationship outcomes from the perspective of buyers. Relationship quality mainly relies on the level of buyer's trust in and commitment to the seller. Relationship outcomes usually can be expressed by the variables like repurchase, referral and cooperation. The relationship among these variables constructed the model of buyer-seller relationship in industrial market. Compared with typical consumer market, industrial market has the following characteristics: big volume deal and long lasting relationship between buyer and seller. This paper developed an industrial market buyer-seller relationship model in China. The model tried to point out the effect of buyer and seller aspects on trust and commitment, as well as the effect of trust and commitment on relationship outcomes from the perception of buyers. The integrated model has been tested in the context of machinery industry. The empirical study has proved the hypotheses of the model: seller's customer orientation, seller's technical competence, reputation, shared value and buyer's investment in the relationship has positive influence on trust and commitment; trust and commitment has positive influence on relationship outcomes, such as repurchase, referral and cooperation. Based on the results of the study, the following customer relationship marketing strategies have been suggested to the industrial companies: to establish customer-oriented organization structure, to build customer database, to adopt total quality management process, to implement internal marketing and to improve service quality related to the industrial products.