Can we imagine a place in the world today without a marketing activity. It looks remote. When we all move from one place to the other, we need an interactive or a Communicative Response System (CRS) to facilitate a marketing activity and enable the market to respond. When this Communicative Response System (CRS) eventually reaches a market, there are buyers and sellers waiting to respond.

Marketing is not today what it used to be years ago. It started as a barter and has reached a currency world with a variety of geographical segments and demographics. Marketing in simple terms is a distribution of products and services of a company in order to realize a value in form or in kind. While it is true, marketing today encompasses a wide range of activities including relationship building.

Relationship building is key to the success of any service organization. A marketing activity does not end with a buy or a sale. Today, it requires establishing and building capabilities to create retention. From the company's point of view, identifying and understanding the requirements of the customer in clear terms is the first step in the process of starting a relationship building exercise.

Private banking sector, for instance, in India has undergone a tremendous change in the last 5-6 years. From being a lending institution, private banking has spread its wings to include services such as insurance, risk-management, asset-management as the core activities. The bottom-line is your capability to build, develop and maintain a relationship that is long-standing and mutually beneficial. Because, the chances of succeeding service marketing or any type of marketing for that matter, depends firstly on the extent of proximity you could establish with the company.

Service marketing is gaining prominence in all sectors. BPOs, Call Centers are making huge money in contrast to the product marketing. The top 5 factors influencing relationship building exercise to succeed in service marketing are

1. Be customer-centric. Put the customer first and for a moment put yourself in the customers' place.

2. Identify and understand what customer wants in terms of products and services and the value that you could create to your customer by offering your services.

3. Consistent follow-up with the customer to demonstrate the extent of interest and seriousness and also the capabilities that you have developed over a period of time, for instance, your client base.

4. Respond in time to the requirements of your customer and focus on feedback evaluation to check and ensure you did not deviate anything from the specifications.

5. Share your success with your friends and colleagues to create in a way your brand image and stay on to receive feedback and suggestions from them.

I am a New Delhi based freelance journalist. I write articles and am particularly interested in non-fiction. My areas of interest include writing business articles, parenting, health and entertainment. I can be reached at hp31_67@yahoo.com