Relationship Marketing Practices and Customer Loyalty (With Special Reference to Easy Mart Super Market Malawa)

Abstract

Every and each firm in any industry is required to have a good marketing team bonded with perfect strategies. In order to having sustainable competitive advantages, firms should acquire and in fact, retain profitable strategic customers. It is important to use relationship marketing; a philosophy of winning businesses focusing on managing long lasting profitable relationships with existing customers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of relationship marketing on creation of customer loyalty at Easy Mart super markets; specially focused on Malawa outlet. The study focused on both primary and secondary data in which the research was based on Nelson Oly Ndubisi’s relationship marketing model. Primary data was collected from 163 Easy Mart customers using a questionnaire which derived from the literature review. Reliability test, KMO test, normality test, Pearson correlation analysis and multiple regression were used to test the impact of four key relationship marketing practices, namely trust, commitment, communication and conflict handling. Data analysis proved the internal consistency at above 0.7 Cronbach's Alpha value and in the data set was free from multi-collinearity. The findings suggest that three independent variables have a significant and positive effect on customer loyalty. Depending on the findings, it is clear that there is an effect of relationship marketing practices on customer loyalty creation in Easy Mart supermarkets.