Business-to-customer relationships are all about creating loyalty, and over the past 50 years marketers have been developing strategies and tools to keep customers coming back for more. Yet researchers and marketers have paid much less attention to business-to-business (B2B) relationships even though losing a B2B customer in an industry can be a catastrophe - the equivalent of losing thousands of end customers.
Our research shows that with the right strategy, businesses can go about building loyal relationships with other businesses. The research is based on a survey of 350 B2B relationships in the financial services industry throughout New Zealand.
The first thing we found is that the best way to create loyalty is to work on behaviour and use that to build true loyalty. It is a reversal of previous research findings, which suggest that if you create a loyal attitude then the behaviour will follow.
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