Paper info

Relationship Marketing in Agricultural Products Marketing: Case Findings from the Food and Beverage Sector

Adam Lindgreen and Martin Hingley

The paper was published at the 17th IMP-conference in Oslo, Norway in 2001.

This paper focuses on the relationship marketing approach to the marketing of agriculturalproducts. The paper provides specific insights into and comparisons between suppliers of twoparticular agricultural products sectors: in Britain, the fresh produce (fruits and vegetables)sector and, in New Zealand, the wine sector. The paper examines the nature of marketingrelationships from the perspective of the suppliers in these sectors and their relationships,networks and interactions with importers and retail buyers in the food and beverage sector.The research methodology is qualitative and inductive in nature and utilises multiple cases;interpretation is through content analysis of each individual case in order to identifyimportant themes, clusters and patterns in the research data. Investigated marketing issuesinclude: (1) nature of relationship marketing, (2) implementation of relationship marketingand (3) monitoring and measurement of relationship marketing.