Do services exporters build relationships? Some qualitative perspectives

Investigates whether success factors for Australian services firms that export to Asia are consistent with the theory of relationship marketing, and demonstrates the power of the in‐depth interview methodology for exploring marketing theory. Relationship marketing theory suggests that services firms should adopt a relationship marketing approach while goods firms might use a transactional approach. To investigate this theory, a series of in‐depth interviews were conducted in firms marketing agribusiness products to Asia. We found that growth in the agribusiness services sector could be attributed to their strategy of “pairing” with Australian commodity exporters rather than to entering the market directly. Contrary to expectations, we found that Australian goods firms consider building relationships with Asian distributors and customers crucial to initiating and maintaining an export strategy. Furthermore, Australian agribusiness services firms do not seek to enter the market on their own but build relationships with Australian firms as a means of accessing the Asian market. The results demonstrate the power of qualitative methods for uncovering results that confirm or disconfirm existing theory.