A Study On Commercial Guanxi Concept In The Chinese Local Culture Context

Recently, Relationship Marketing (RM) has become one of the hottest topics in the domestic marketing academia. Although the two words are the same in the Chinese character, there's a great difference between the "relationship" of RM in the western academic context and what the Chinese encounter everyday, the Chinese "Guanxi". Ignoring the Chinese local culture context, the retail of the western RM in China will be a disaster to the true and thorough understanding of the Chinese RM practice. Thus a re-research on Guanxi in Chinese native commercial context is crucial and urgent.On the basis of a systematical literature review, this article compares the difference of Guanxi and RM between Chinese and western culture context. Qualitative researchmethod------content analysis and focus group investigation are used to get a totalunderstanding of Guanxi both from the academia and from the practitioners. Quantitiveanalysis-------questionnaire investigation and factor analysis are implemented todevelop a native commercial Guanxi concept scale. After comparison of the qualitative and quantitive research results, an integrated Guanxi concept systematization is built, including categories of Guanxi constructs, Guanxi descriptive index and Guanxi functional index. This job is the fundamental work for a further research on Guanxi topic seriously.