Managing market relationships

The ability of a firm to create and maintain relationships with their most valuable customers is a durable basis for a competitive advantage. To keep this edge over rivals, who continually try to attract these customers away, a firm has to master the three elements of a market-relating capability. First, a relationship orientation must pervade the mind-set, values, and norms of the organization. Second, the firm must keep deepening its knowledge of these customers and putting it to work throughout the organization. Third, the key processes must be internally integrated and externally aligned with the corresponding processes of the firm's customers. George S. Day is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, professor of marketing, and director of the Huntsman Center for Global Competition and Innovation at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he was executive director of the Marketing Science Institute. He has authored 12 books and 125 articles in the areas of marketing and strategic business planning. He has received various awards, including two Alpha Kappa Psi Foundation Awards and two Harold H. Maynard Awards for the best articles published in theJournal of Marketing; in 1994, he received the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award for distinguished contributions to the field of marketing; and in 1996, he received the Paul D. Converse Award. He was selected as the outstanding marketing educator for 1999 by the Academy of Marketing Sciences.