Research On The Influence Of Relationship Quality On Buyers'Post-purchase Behavior Intention In Industrial Marketing Context

Since the beginning of the21st century, China's industrial manufacturing companies have been experiencing unprecedented competitive pressures. With the strengthening of the trend of global economic integration, Chinese enterprises have to build their competitive advantage to face the challenge of participation in the international division of labor, as well as to meet the need of industrialization of China. So China's manufacturing industry will come to an era of rapid development. However, the current industrial manufacturing companies, in terms of the marketing awareness or marketing skills are lagging far behind; these have become important bottleneck constraints of enhancing the competitiveness of the Chinese industrial market companies. How to explore the mechanism between the core elements of an industrial marketing context and to achieve the transformation of the marketing awareness and marketing breakthrough by constructing the theoretical system of the industrial marketing context have become industrial marketing practice problems which to be solved.However, for a long time, researchers paid little attention to neither the theoretical system construction nor the study of depth extent of industrial marketing. There is so much difference between consumer market and industrial market that the theoretical framework and research results of consumer market cannot be used directly in industrial marketing. In addition, in recent years the study of marketing theory has been lost into a customer loyalty dilemma, more and more investment have been put by companies in the pursuit of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, while the truly loyal customers are increasingly the less. In most marketing study, there is a paradox that transaction consumer behavior but relational consumer behavior was used to verify the customer loyalty cause which was essentially a relationship phenomenon. Since the forms of customer behavior have become diversified in recent years, the defects of traditional marketing theoretical system which regards customer loyalty as the ultimate goal are more and more obvious. So it is suggested that marketing theoretical system be reformed and innovated.So this paper starts form the discrimination of industrial marketing context with the two main research themes of customer behavior and relationship marketing. On this basis, in accordance with the two logical clues of "transaction benefit is the essential attribute of any relationship" and "attitudes influence behavior", the paper builds a theoretical framework of the "benefit-relationship quality-buyer's purchase behavior intention". And then empirical research is carried out based on238samples from manufacturing enterprises. As a result, this paper systematically explains the mechanism of relationship quality influencing BPBI, reveals the path to implement customer relationship management improving marketing practice performance.This paper mainly solves three issues:(1) Based on construction theory and fuzzy cluster analysis, the paper reveals the theoretical framework of industrial marketing, as well as the constituent dimensions and measurement system of the two main constructs——relationship quality and BPBI.(2) By theoretical and empirical research, this paper explains the mechanism of relationship quality influencing BPBI, reveals the direct and indirect impact of every relationship quality's dimension on BPBI.(3) This paper explains the causes to bulid customer relationship quality from the two-dimensional perspective of trading benefit and the relationship benefit, reveals not only the different influencing factors of internal dimensions of relationship quality, but also the mutual hierarchical relationship among the dimensins.The conclusions and implications of this study include:First,"Corporate-Customer relationship quality and BPBI" are the two main themes of industrial marketing. Relationship quality includes three dimensions: customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer commitment. BPBI is a two-dimensional structure with transaction and relational constructs. This conclusion not only makes it clear that the content of industrial marketing research, but also provides the method to measure and improve the relationship quality and BPBI in industrial market. Secondly, in industrial marketing context, either transaction benefit or relationship benefit has a significant positive impact on the two of three dimensions of relationship quality:customer satisfaction and customer trust. But they have no direct impact on the other dimension:customer commitment. The conclusions show that more transaction benefits including of good product quality and service are the foundation of a high level of customer satisfaction and trust, while relationship benefit is also an effective way to improve customer trust. So much concern and investment should be given on relationship benefit by enterprises in order to improve customer trust and also to reduce the negative impact of customer satisfaction on BPBI.Third, there are progressive hierarchical relationships between the three dimensions of relationship quality. Customer satisfaction directly affect the degree of customer trust while indirectly affect the level of customer commitment. The conclusion shows that in the context of industrial marketing, customer satisfaction is only the primary stage of the customer relationship, customer trust and customer commitment are the advanced stages to effectively improve marketing performance.Fourth, different dimensions of relationship quality have different influence on the two sides of customer purchase behavior tendencies. Customer satisfaction didn't significantly impact transactional BPBI, while significantly and negatively impact relational BPBI. Both customer trust and customer commitment have significantly positive influence on not only transaction but also relational customer behavior intention. To transactional BPBI, the effects of customer commitment were significantly greater than those of customer trust. In contrast, to relational BPBI, the effects of customer trust were obviously greater than those of customer commitment. The conclusions show that in the industrial marketing context, on one hand, sellers should improve customer commitment to guide the generation of customer transaction behavioral tendencies, and thus to improve marketing performance; on the other hand, sellers need to enhence the level of customer trust to ensure the probability of relational customers purchase behavioral tendencies that can help companies encounter crisisl event. Fifth, relationship quality can be a separate pre-variable to affect BPBI, and at the same time,"benefit" with two-dimensional structure of the transaction and relationship has become the main factor affecting the quality of the enterprise-customer relationship. Relationship quality plays a full role in intermediary between benefit and BPBI.Sixth, the sample firm characteristics variables such as enterprise scale, business dealings time, firm size differences as well as the product of procurement affect relationship quality and BPBI differently.The main innovation of this paper is:(1) Breaking through the limitation of marketing context, this paper analyzes the similarities and differences of different marketing situations, defines industrial marketing context as a separate study situation, and constructs a complete research framework and measurement system.(2) Solving the disputes of causes and effects as well as internal dimensions of relationship quality, this paper reveals relationship quality is a multidimensional variable with three dimensions. Its antecedent variable is "benefit" and its subsequent variable is BPBI.(3) Breaking through the bottleneck of consumer behavior study, this paper reveals the reasons of the paradox of consumer loyalty; builds a complete framework by using the diversified buyer behavior as the dependent variable.