Abstract:

Competition dynamics within the contemporary economy leads enterprises to place the customer with his needs and preferences in the center of all their marketing efforts, in order to build long term customer profitable relationships. In this context, the concept of relationship marketing attracts broader attention among business professionals and researchers alike. Relationship marketing in Romania is adopted and effectively conducted especially in the multinational companies and large organization context. The SMEs sector represents 99.7 % of the national economy and it is characterized by diversity, heterogeneity, flexibility, dynamism and a high degree of adaptability. However, the Romanian enterprises from this category tend to have a vague notion of marketing in general, and are prone to operate valuing constructs and instruments specific to transactional approach. Thus, studying the managerial perspective in the Romanian SMEs is both useful for SMEs practitioners, in terms of customer retention increase, and nonetheless for the scholars with similar pursuits in the research area. The paper aims to explore the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs of the managers from the Romanian SMEs regarding relationship marketing concept and also to analyze in what extent this marketing optic is driven by specific features such as: enterprise size, industry, customers’ category, internal and contextual factors of enterprise environment. In this sense, the paper is structured in six sections as follow: introduction, Romanian SMEs context, SMEs marketing particularity, research methodology, findings and conclusions. The research study makes use of both qualitative and quantitative data. Information collection for the research was conducted in the field of literature, government documents and national and international statistics. In order to generate more information regarding the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs of the managers from the Romanian SMEs towards relationship marketing concept the research study involved a focus group with some managers, representative from the point of view of: size, industry, customers, internal and external factors of SMEs. The paper reveals that the relationship marketing concept has various perspectives among Romanian managers and its using in practice is especially avoided due to the financial crisis context

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