ost accounting. His theory is that relationship marketing consists of "attracting, developing, and retaining customers...[and making sure that] all activities are directed toward establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges....the objective of relationship marketing is not only to acquire customers but to keep them as well. Moreover, in this 'new philosophy,' customer satisfaction becomes the responsibility of everyone in the organization" (Petrof, 1997, 26).
Petrof then admits that even though "paying attention to relationships with clients has long been a way of doing business, much of the current literature assumes it to be a new phenomenon, especially in consumer markets. Advocates go so far as to maintain that buyer-seller relationships have become an integral part of business-to-business operating strategies only over the past ten years" (Petrof, 1997, 27). Whether it has been around for ten years, or one hundred years, the question of equating customer value with profits still remains.
Customer value is a difficult factor to define, let alone to quantify and measure. Yet those companies which are able to define customer value in the same way as their customers are those which are successful; those companies which cannot develop an accurate measurement of how their customers perceive their products are likely to fail. At the most simple level, providing value to the customer means that the customer perceives that the product or service in question is worth the price of that product and that the long-term benefit from the purchase is likely to outweigh the short-term cost (Ferling, 1993, p. 51).
Companies which focus on providing high levels of customer value are interested in maintaining relationships with their customers over the long-term. It can safely be said that that has been the secret to the success of Precision Dynamics, the company which this writer has been associated with f...