Self-determined relationship marketing: Conceptualization and complexity

Relationship marketing (RM) has attracted numerous studies from different perspectives to explain its concepts, models and processes. Extant literature, however, appears to be mainly "firm-determined" (Dholakia, 2006), where a firm dominates a relationship initiation, development and resolution with the customer. As research exploring the customer's role in a relationship is on the rise, advancement in such a customer "self-determined" relationship remains scarce. Understanding a relationship from the customer's point of view is crucial, because without mutual effort by both customers and the firm, a relationship is likely to be superficial and short-term. In addressing the paucity of a customer self-determined relationship, this study reviews extant literature and extends a self-determined relationship beyond Dholakia's (2006) original conceptualisation as simply the relationship initiation, but also to contain the relationship development, maintenance and dissolution in a relationship lifecycle. The complexity for scoping a self-determination RM is also critically discussed.