Relationship building in cross-cultural business-to-business context

Abstract

During the past decades, international trade of goods and services has been growing fast. In the globalizing market, understanding cultural differences is essential. When building customer relationships across national borders, the possibility of cultural conflicts and misunderstandings is substantial and many factors must be taken into consideration. In business-to-business market the importance of individual customers is emphasized. High customer loyalty can improve a company’s performance significantly by increasing revenue and reducing customer acquisition costs. Therefore, the importance of relationship quality cannot be questioned. This thesis is a literature review that seeks to find the key elements of cross-cultural relationship strength by first studying the elements of relationship quality and then combining these findings to the cross-cultural context.