New Trend of Marketing Strategy for Agricultural Producing Districts : From the viewpoint of Relationship

摘要

This article reconsiders the trends of agricultural marketing for producing districts in Japan and examines the effectiveness and feasibility of introducing relationship marketing paradigm to agricultural marketing. Existing articles have targeted mainly on farm organization belonging to cooperative but cannot give proper strategies to confront the recent changes of marketing environment, especially the drastic change of wholesale markets. Other research-groups have analyzed new marketing channels but have not constructed the framework for comparing and theorizing the findings on case studies. Relationship marketing is a new paradigm of marketing research and provides the following useful viewpoints for investigating agricultural marketing: 1) importance of long-term relationship formation and maintenance, 2) attention to interaction process and 3) consideration of the impact of social context. Several preliminary investigations show that relationship analysis is feasible in agricultural marketing, especially on the analyses of shipping network, service concerning agricultural products, relationship with consumers and social aspects which affects transactions.