In the last two decades, practitioners and academics have focused increasingly on how firms relate to their markets. This has resulted in the emergence of a subdiscipline of marketing referred to as relationship marketing. The academic field of relationship marketing is now well established and has broadened to include relationships not only with end customers but also with all the various stakeholders associated with a firm. However, in order for the discipline to mature there is now the need for further conceptual refinement. This special issue therefore focuses on theoretical and empirical papers that provide conceptual developments to the field of relationship marketing. The seven papers and five commentary articles for this issue were selected either from the call for papers in a previous issue, or from the 10th International Colloquium in Relationship Marketing that was held at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany in September/October 2002. Each paper was chosen because it made a valuable and interesting conceptual refinement to the academic field. What is impressive is that most of the papers are by younger academics. It is also interesting to note the breadth of international 5
Nonmetric procedures such a MONANOVA have been developed to estimate attribute utilities with ranked observations. It is argued that the goodness of the estimation procedure is another criterion which favors a metric procedure like Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regression. MONANOVA and OLS Regression are compared in their ability to recover attribute utilities with both ranked and scaled observations.
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