C/M/250. Relationship Marketing, Customer Loyalty and Loyalty Cards: The Case of Superdrug and Other Leading Food, Health and Beauty Retailers

This dissertation examines a number of major areas in marketing: relationship marketing, customer loyalty and loyalty cards schemes. More specifically, it asks whether value retailers, such as Superdrug in the health and beauty sector and ASDA in the food retail sector should adopt loyalty cards schemes, currently in use by the leading firms in both sectors, Boots and Tesco respectively. Loyalty card schemes aim to build closer, stronger relationships between a firm and its customers, making it less reliant on price sensitive customers. However, the schemes have come under considerable criticism, whilst relationship marketing and the notion of customer loyalty has numerous opponents of their own. This dissertation has two main uses: First, it represents a good example of how to construct a dissertation using a survey. Second, it contains an extremely comprehensive literature review, which not only details and critically discusses relationship marketing, customer loyalty and loyalty card schemes, but also the decreasing relevance of traditional marketing and the need to balance both customer acquisition and retention strategies to be successful in increasingly competitive marketplaces.