Clearly, relationship marketing is changing the dynamics of the market place by unveiling new forms of competitive advantage. Firms therefore, need to take cognisance of these changes and the ensuing challenges they represent for their organisation.

For this, companies will have to focus on customer retention and customer benefits, and invest in building a long-term relationship with the customer, possibly through extensive, heavy customer contact and total customer commitment. The seminar therefore, focussed on increasing the understanding of the challenges and their consequences.

Bill Donaldson, academic manager and senior lecturer (marketing), Strathclyde Graduate Business School, UK, made a one-hour presentation on `Relationship Marketing: Buyer-supplier relationships and the changing role of the sales force'. This was followed by a panel discussion involving marketing gurus of the Indian corporate sector, and moderated by JagdeepKapoor, managing director of Samsika Marketing Consultants.

Speaking on `relationship marketing in services', Walter Pereira, management consultant and president of Marketing Advisory Services Group, said: ``In the service industry, the goal is not only zero-defect but zero-defection. So customers have to be built on a long-term scale. The typical nature of a service industry is that the customer is more involved with the service and actually uses it.''

With specific reference to the FMCG industry, Ashok Jain, managing director and CEO, Cadbury Schweppes, reiterated that even though typically, FMCGs are mass distributed, they too can gain from building a relationship with the customer.

Amazon.com, for example, goes beyond selling books to keeping the surfer posted on new titles, sends ``post-it pads'', etc. Therefore, even in the FMCG category, companies are resorting to getting customers involved with the brand by holding events, giving participative offers and unconditional guarantees andcross-promotions.

In the durables market -- which has two segments, the entry market and the replacement market -- the rules of relationship marketing hold true in both. However, here, relationship marketing depends more on the technical and after-sales service offered by durables companies to their customers, said Bal Palekar, vice-president, Eureka Forbes. Coming close to the customer therefore depends not the industry -- but on the industrious manager.