Research on Influence of Socio-Demographic Characteristics on Perceived Relationship Quality in Retail

Maintaining long-term profitable relationships with customers is one of the imperatives in the core of companies' marketing strategies. Transaction marketing has for some time been replaced by relationship marketing. Companies have increasingly recognised the importance and necessity of targeting cooperation with a customer on the basis of business activity that includes moving focus from achieving a short-term sales and profit, and from only “sales closure” and individual, single transactions on development and maintaining long-term relationships of trust and respect. In doing so, the providers stop being aggressive purchase stimulators to sell one more product, but they assist customers in decision making process, problem solving and acquiring long-term value. The abovementioned should be a way of making profit for the company, not in terms of current, short-term sales increase but in terms of acquiring loyal customer and thereby assurance of long-term benefit. Relationship quality, representing total estimation of relationship with customers, is an important concept within relationship marketing. Customers’ behaviour intentions in the future will depend on power of relationship with customers. Relationship quality is multidimensional construct. There is consent in literature on key (the most common in research) dimensions of relationship quality and they are satisfaction, trust, and commitment. The purpose of this paper is to research the influence of socio-demographic characteristics on relationship quality in retail sector (hypermarkets in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Relationship quality is determined as two-dimensional one. The components are satisfaction and trust. Socio-demographic characteristics are: age, gender, education and income. Total of 861 respondents took part in the research. There was a quota sample with control variables: city, shop, gender and age. T-Test and ANOVA were used to examine differences in evaluation of satisfaction and trust regarding socio-demographic characteristics. The analysis of obtained research results indicates existence of statistically significant differences among respondents in perception of relationship quality concerning gender and income. On the other hand, there was not statistically significant difference among respondents in perception of relationship quality concerning age and education. Cognition on influence of socio-demographic factors on satisfaction and trust as determinant of relationship quality will enable more successful implementation of market segmentation in effort to increase satisfaction and strengthen the trust in a certain shop.