Managing and implementing simultaneous transaction and relationship marketing

There is growing acknowledgement that companies are engaging in both transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing activity. However, apart from a small body of work, little consideration has been paid to the management and implementation challenges involved in conducting both types of marketing concurrently. In particular, there have been few studies that consider, from a holistic organisational perspective, how transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing management‐decision making impact on each other in reality and the extent to which organisations are investing appropriate resources in simultaneously implementing the two approaches. This article reports on a longitudinal, in‐depth study of a high‐street retail bank. The findings indicate that, in practice, resource investment in transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing management was unbalanced with an over‐emphasis on some managerial dimensions and an under‐investment in others. In other words the bank under investigation did not engage in effective transaction or relationship planning or implementation but rather the managerial and organisational focus was on sales and promotion.