Business Commons^™

The Power Of Power In Supplier-Retailer Relationships, Nirmalya Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In his interesting paper, Martin Hingley makes a few key observations about power and role accorded to it in the relationship marketing literature that has become increasingly popular over the past decade. Fundamentally, the article states that the relationship marketing view sees power as alien to effective relationships, as negating cooperation, and as the antithesis of trust. In other words, power in a relationship is ‘‘only viewed in a negative sense’’. Or, alternatively, power is viewed as not important enough to include in relationship marketing models because firms have moved from transactional exchanges to relational exchange. It is contended by …