International Relationship Marketing: Intellectual Foundations and Avenues for Further Research

Relationship marketing is a central and important tenet in marketing thought, and considerable research effort in the discipline has been devoted to examining various facets of relationship marketing, resulting in a large body of knowledge. In this study, the authors specifically focus on the international dimension of the relationship marketing literature and use citation and cocitation data to identify and unfold its intellectual foundations. The goal is to provide new and meaningful avenues for further research using the knowledge structure on which international relationship marketing stands. The examination of the literature spans more than 40 years, divided into three time periods that permit detection of longitudinal trends as well as meaningful visual representations of the cocitation data. Overall, the authors survey 29 key publications and identify 3,509 articles that include 230,684 citations, examining the data for 1972-1993, 1994-2003, and 2004-2013 to unfold research possibilities. Drawing on the analysis of emergent multidimensional scaling results, the authors discuss potential international relationship marketing research incorporating social relations and networking, new ventures, internationalization, trust and commitment, tacit knowledge, and cultural values.