Marketers use relationship marketing to establish mutually beneficial long-term relationships with their customers as ameans to retain them in the competitive market environment. Relationship marketing should not be used to target everycustomer as not all customers want to build long-term relationships with organisations. In order to identify the mostprofitable customers for relationship marketing, organisations should consider their customers’ relationship intentionsto form long-term relationships with them. The primary objective of this study was to determine young adults’ (aged 18to 25) relationship intentions towards the South African cell phone network operators they use, namely Vodacom,MTN or Cell C. Five constructs (involvement, expectations, forgiveness, feedback and fear of relationship loss) wereused to measure relationship intention. Data was collected from 315 respondents at a tertiary education institution inSouth Africa by means of a non-probability convenience sample. Findings indicate that a relatively high percentage ofrespondents have a high relationship intention towards their cell phone network operator and that respondents with highrelationship intentions are more Involved with and Fear losing their relationship with their cell phone network operatorthan respondents with low relationship intentions.
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