Customer relationship marketing in automobile industry: The Toyota cars dealers and customers in Bangkok.

Abstract

Customer relationship marketing (CRM) is an essential aspect in the current era of marketing strategy. However, most of the previous researches were more focus on customer relationship on Business-Business (B2B) perspective as well as service company perspective, not many previous researches focus on industrial products. Therefore this research will focus on the automobile industry in terms of car dealers relationship practices toward end-customers. This research suggested overall thirteen practices that cars dealers perform during the customer relationship development process, practices consist of three practices in Pre-relationship phase and another nine practices in Expansion and Commitment Phase. Moreover, the expected outcome car dealers actually expected is not only repeated purchase or cross-selling but they expected ‘Recommendation or positive word-of-mount’ from existing customers, but in order to reach that point, the commitment from customers is required.