The Role of Consumer Knowledge in Relationship Marketing in the Web Context

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Abstract This study aims to explore the linkage between consumer knowledge and relationship marketing, including the association between knowledge content and relationship marketing in a Web-based framework. First, it examines the impact of two types of product knowledge, objective knowledge and subjective knowledge on three primary variables of relationship marketing: satisfaction, repurchase intention and customer loyalty. Then, the effect of four types of knowledge content of the Web: declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, common knowledge and specialized knowledge, on three variables of relationship marketing are studied. The telecommunication retailing market in the United Kingdom has been growing faster than other retail businesses in recent years because of the high growth in the mobile phone sector. The interviews with the mobile phone shop manager and sales representatives showed that the most important information for customers is the tariff. Therefore, mobile phone tariffs are the focal area of this research. Ten hypotheses are developed based on literature reviewed. Five of ten hypotheses are supported by the experiment. The results reveal that there is difference between the effect of objective knowledge and subjective knowledge on relationship marketing factors. The findings also demonstrate that the four types of knowledge content of the Web have impact on relationship marketing variables in different ways. Keywords: consumer knowledge, relationship marketing, the web context Introduction Knowledge is defined as the body of facts and principles (e.g. information and understanding) accumulated by mankind about a domain (Delbridge and Bernard, 1998 cited in Page and Uncles, 2004). Similar to knowledge, consumer knowledge (CK) is the ‘the total amount of information stored in memory’ (Blackwell et al., 2001), but it is a subset of the

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