Relationship marketing, gender, and culture: Implications for consumer behavior

This paper presents a conceptual framework that proposes gender identity and culture as variables that impact on the success of a relationship marketing strategy when dealing with business-to-consumer relations. A number of authors have suggested that firms should adopt both transactional and relational strategies for different customers (Berry 1995; Anderson and Narus 1991). This approach would indicate segmentation based on a relational/transactional continuum. How would a firm determine which customers are more relational (and hence presumably more positively inclined towards engaging in relationships) than others? The framework presented suggests that two variables that have an important influence and have not been examined in the literature are gender and culture. Propositions for future research are suggested.