Dark side of long-term relationships in marketing services

Marketing

Centre for Marketing Working Paper

1999

In their study of marketing services relationships, Moorman, Zaltman, and Deshpandé (1992) were unable to support a hypothesized link between clients' trust in their service providers and clients' utilization of marketing services. This finding runs counter to relationship marketing theory. To explain their result, Moorman, Zaltman, and Deshpandé suggest that, as the duration of a relationship lengthens, it becomes prone to negative influences such as rising expectations on the part of the client and loss of objectivity on the part of the service provider. In this study, we submit these conjectures to an empirical test. Results support the general hypothesis that long-term relationships have a "dark side" that mitigates the positive effects found in previous research. Results also support Moorman, Zaltman and Deshpandé's (1992) main findings in a different research context, with implications for the model's generalizability.

Centre for Marketing, Future Media Research Programme (closed)

97-502

Centre for Marketing Working Paper

No