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Preface
The sale merely consummates the courtship. Then the marriage begins. How good the marriage is depends on how well the relationship is managed by the seller.
—Levitt (1983, p. 111)
Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School’s marketing guru, first revealed marketing’s myopia: management believes that the business is to produce products. In contrast, Levitt’s metaphor for marketing is a marriage. The topic of my research is the special kind of marriage between customers and sellers and the unique, perplexing journey that the customer experiences in undertaking the relationship.
The story of this book starts and ends with my passion for customers.