Role of relationship marketing activities on customer capital: An application towards multinational direct selling companies

The paradigm of relationship marketing has become important in marketing science. In addition, marketing activities carried out by the enterprises have moved away from the classical marketing approaches and started to be shaped around the relationship marketing paradigm. With the spread of relationship markeing, concepts such as customer equity and customer capital have started to come up. Customer equity refers to the value that an internal or external customer has in mind about companies. Customer capital on the other hand, as an element of intellectual capital, summarizes the contribution from current and future returns resulting from its relationship with internal and external customers. In this thesis, it is aimed to investigate the effects of the relationship marketing activities carried by multi-level marketing model of direct selling companies on the creation of customer capital. In order to achieve this aim, a research has been carried out on the internal customers of direct selling companies. In this research process, 151 surveys data collected by using convenience sampling method for 5-point Likert type scales. Pre-tests were examined on SPSS and hypothesis tests were analyzed by using Smart-PLS programs for data collected. As a result of the analyzes conducted, it is seen that the relationship marketing activities of companies is not directly effecting the customer capital but is effecting customer equity. Also customer capital is effected by the customer equity. Finally, it is revealed that relationship marketing activities are effecting customer capital by moderating effect of customer equity. Based on the results of the research, it was emphasied that the companies should give more importance to the customer equity in the context of internatl customers while conducting relationship marketing activities. Suggestions have been made to enterprises to increase the customer capital through customer equity. It is aimed to examine the impact of relationship marketing activities on creating customer capital by approaching multinational direct selling companies operate in Turkey.