Customer-Oriented-Marketing Approaches: Similarities and Divergences

Today, strong competition and offer standardisation are the most common features of any economy. As result, customer relationship has become one of the most important elements of companies’ strategies. Unlike the transactional approach, the relational approach emphasises the necessity and continuity of relationship. Therefore, an important theoretical and practical corpus has been devoted to the relationship concept, which has led to the emergence of several approaches in the field of customer-oriented marketing. In fact, relationship marketing, marketing one-to-one and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are certainly marketing approaches that focus on the customer in order to personalize the relationship and strengthen customer loyalty. However, the academic and managerial literature includes various controversial definitions of these approaches. The objective of this study is to present a clear and precise conceptual framework for customer-oriented marketing approaches. Firstly, we will focus the passage from transactional marketing to relationship marketing. Secondly, we will explain customer-oriented marketing approaches to achieve with a comparative analysis of these approaches and their classification based by the degree of customer orientation and the use of Information and Communication Technologies.