Introduction
Although marketing practices can be traced back as far as 7000 B.C. (Carratu,
1987), marketing thought as a distinct discipline was borne out of economics
around the beginning of this century. As the discipline gained momentum, and
developed through the first three quarters of the twentieth century, the primary
focus was on transactions and exchanges. However, the development of
marketing as a field of study and practice is undergoing a reconceptualization
in its orientation from transactions to relationships (Kotler, 1990; Webster,
1992). The emphasis on relationships as opposed to transaction based
exchanges is very likely to redefine the domain of marketing (Sheth et al.,
1988). Indeed, the emergence of a relationship marketing school of thought is
imminent given the growing interest of marketing scholars in the relational
paradigm.
In this paper, we observe, that the paradigm shift from transactions to
relationships is associated with the return of direct marketing both in
business-to-business (BTB) and business-to-consumer (BTC) markets. As in
the pre-industrial era (characterized by direct marketing practices of
agricultural and artifact producers) once again direct marketing, albeit in a
different form, is becoming popular, and consequently so is the relationship