Marketing de relaciones y creación de capital social. El caso de las agencias de desarrollo local

Local development issues have been analysed from several approach es and disciplines, such as sociology, economic policy, geography, or business and administration. Also marketing makes a contribution through the study of territorial marketing. The common nexus of all these disciplines seems to be the concepts of «social capital» and «relational assets». The current work try to analyse this problem from a territorial marketing perspective focusing on local development agencies’ activities. From a relational marketing approach, these activities involve to establish relationships, more or less close, between the agencies and a variety of target groups. In this context, our work is aimed at applying the relationship marketing approach to the problem of local development. We study the relational orientation between local development agencies and various actors from within their environment as a measurement of social capital. Likewise, we analyse the influence of economic development objectives on the relational orientation of partnerships, as well as the correspondence between the relational orientation and the results. The empirical study focuses on particular cases of Castilla y León development agencies operating at local and regional level.