Impact of Advancement in Information Technology in Enhancing Relationship Marketing Strategies used by SMEs in the Grocery Sector, Zimbabwe

Abstract

The growth in Information Technology has re defined marketing strategies, leading to the development and the extinction of the old marketing practices. The old marketing practices had always led to many Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) fail to prioritise marketing as they deemed it expensive and required many protocols to be followed before implementation of the strategy. The continuous evolution of various information technology systems has of late threatened the existence of a human being in the marketing career as the carrier is swiftly being dominated by electronic devices that can effectively be commanded to interact and respond to consumer queries promptly. To date they are conflicting views on the effect of adopting information technology in the marketing discipline. The researcher seeks to validate whether information technology can enhance the up sage implementation of relationship marketing or it has come to destroy the intimate human relations consumers have with firms in the grocery sector in Zimbabwe. The researcher adopted a survey approach in data gathering and interviews were used, convenience sampling was done mainly on SMEs in Harare selected suburbs in the grocery sector. The study was informed by Hill ( 2006) customer loyalty stages. The major target sample of SMEs was 25, however upon conducting 19 interviews, data saturation was reached and no further data was collected. The findings from the study indicated that advancement in information technology has created many marketing platforms firms use to embrace relationship marketing although the media has failed to sustainable convert the consumers into advocates and has also led firms to lose some of its old customers who are generally technology laggards. The research recommends blending of both traditional and digital information technology based marketing platforms to ensure sustainable relationships between the company and its customers. This is based on the findings that many firms have of late abandoned traditional relationship marketing platforms only relying on virtual relations where culturally in Zimbabwe a relationship is made concrete when parties meet physically.