Foreword

Abstract

ForwardWelcome to this special issue of Journal of Promotional Communications .The focus for the papers in this edition is Relationship Marketing and thestrategies organisations are adopting to build relationships or engagetheir consumers. Relationship Marketing, emergent in the 1990s as aresponse to the particular demands of the service context, hasestablished itself as a bedrock of the marketing and promotions discipline(Gummesson 2017). Recent attention on engagement (Vivek et al. 2012,2014) has reinvigorated the discipline and marketers increasinglyprioritise the ongoing interactions and connections they are able to forgewith relational partners. Whilst trust and commitment continue to be thecore conceptual building blocks of relationship marketing (Morgan andHunt 1994) increasingly gratitude is seen as an area central to theongoing reciprocal exchange which characterizes mutually beneficialrelationships (Palmatier et al. 2009; Raggio et al. 2014; Cownie 2017).Key outcomes of relationship marketing can be broadly categorizedinto loyalty, co-operation and advocacy.