Empirical Study On The Effect Of Maketing Channel Communication On Relationship Performance

Channel communication not only is an adhesive among channel members, but also relational competency which can bring strategic advantage for the channel members. Given its importance, channel communication increasingly attracts interest and attention between academia and industry. Currently, domestic and foreign scholars focus on the instrumental properties of channel communication and their relationship with financial performance, ignoring the social attributes of channel communication and their relationship performance. In the context of China, not only has it important theoretical significance but also some practical significance to study the impact of channel communication on relationship performance.This paper focuses on "how channel communication affects relationship performance" of the issues. Firstly, the author reviews the literatures, defines two important concepts of channel communication and relationship performance, clears the dimension of channel communication and relational governance, and points out the existing problems in the research. Secondly, according to transaction cost theory and social exchange theory, the author constructs a "channel communication - relational governance - relationship performance" mechanisms of conceptual model and proposes all assumptions about each variable. Finally, this paper uses of questionnaire to collect data and tests an empirical hypothesis by linear regression and structural equation model. At last, the author discusses and illustrates the results.Through empirical testing, this paper's main conclusions obtained are: (1) instrumental communication and social communication will significantly improve the relationship performance of retailers, and the effect of instrumental communication on relationship performance is stronger than the influence of social communication; (2) instrumental communication and social communication will significantly increase the retailer's use of relational governance, and the impacting of instrumental communication on relational governance is stronger than the effect of social communication; (3) joint problem-solving helps to improve the retailer's relationship performance and plays a mediating role between channel communication and relationship performance as well, and the effect of joint planning on relathinship is not significant.The innovation of this paper is: (1) this paper defines the concept of relationship performance and examines the influence of channel communication on relationship performance in the Chinese context. In the background of Chinese cultural, based behavior view of channel performance, the author defines the concept of relationship performance, and this paper tests the influence of channel communication on relationship performance; (2) this paper introduces relational governance into the relationship between channel communication and relationship performance, constructs and validates a "channel communication - relational governance - relationship performance" mechanisms model. Based on transaction cost theory and social exchange theory, the paper theoretically analyses the connection among channel communication, relational governance and relationship performance. And this paper examines the mediating effect of relational governance.