In the era of globalization associated with tremendous shifts from traditional philosophies to modern, dynamic perceptions, and most importantly an era of societies dedicated to consumption, Relationship Marketing has emerged in response to the new values and trends of the century.

This essay will be an attempt to make a comparison between the RM and other approaches to satisfying customers’ needs and wants and to highlight the main differences, advantages, and disadvantages of this theory. Therefore, we will focus on the main ideas lying underneath the concept of RM, how it emerged, developed, and what is its positioning in the marketing literature and practice today.

RM is suggested as the new marketing paradigm of our times (Gronroos, 1994). This term firstly alluded by Thomas (1976), but explicitly used by Berry (1983), until very recently has only existed in relation, or opposition to the theory and practice of TM. Therefore, we need to look at the content of TM, which was the accepted model of how marketing worked and should be practiced , to fully understand the purpose and main ideas of RM.
As dominant paradigm of the 20th century, a time of high consumer trust, effective mass marketing, growing prosperity, homogenous demand, poorly developed distribution channels and dominant manufacturers (O'DriscoU and Murray 1998: 396) the Transactional or Marketing Mix paradigm appeared to be an effective approach towards successful business. The main idea behind Transactional Marketing is that consumers are a passive part in a one-way ‘relationship’ with suppliers/producers. The Paradigm sought to 'bend' the customer to fit the product (Tzokas and Saren 1996; Thomas 1976; Shani and Chalasani 1993).
Neil Borden developed the concept of ‘marketing mix’ in the 1950’s, and this mix of different means of competitions was labeled - the 4P’s (product, price, place and promotion). In its essence, this was just a list of categories of marketing variables. The 4Ps