The goal of this preface is to describe how the special section on customer relationship management (CRM) was developed. In May 2003, Richard Staelin, Executive Director of the Teradata Center for Customer Relationship Management at Duke University, proposed that Journal of Marketing ( JM) publish a special section. The proposal included activities that were designed to promote interactions among marketing academics and practitioners; the goal was to stimulate dialogue and new research on CRM. I found the proposal attractive because CRM is a broad-based topic that interests many marketers. After extensive discussion, the American Marketing Association (AMA) and the Teradata Center formally agreed to cosponsor the special section. Subsequently, there was a conference on Relationship Marketing and Customer Relationship Management (cochaired by Michael Ehret, Wesley Johnston, Michael Kleinaltenkamp, and Lou Pelton) that took place at Freie Universität Berlin in the summer of 2003; 1 a conference on Customer Management (cosponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the Teradata Center) that was held at Duke University in March 2004; and two special sessions on CRM that were featured at the AMA Winter Educators' Conference held in San Antonio, Tex., in February 2005. The conferences provided many opportunities for dialogue, and the response from marketers who attended these events was enthusiastic. I also invited Richard Staelin and William Boulding (Executive Codirector of the Teradata Center) to work with me as consulting editors for the special section, and they agreed. A call for papers requested that authors submit their manuscripts to JM by May 2004. The consulting editors and I evaluated every submission with the assistance of an expert panel that included Leonard Berry, John Deighton, Michael Ehret, Christian Grönroos, Sunil Gupta, Wayne Hoyer, Wagner Kamakura, Wesley Johnston, Donald R. Lehmann, Charlotte Mason, Carl Mela, Scott Neslin, Roland Rust, Michel Wedel, and Valarie Zeithaml. All submissions underwent JM's standard double-blind review process, and members of JM's editorial review board served as reviewers. I would like to express my appreciation to everyone who participated in the development of the special section. The culmination of our work together is a set of nine articles and two essays that advance the science and practice of CRM. I hope that these articles stimulate new intellectual discoveries. —Ruth N. Bolton

The authors examine 308 firms in the United States and four other Western countries to understand how different types of firms relate to their markets. Comparative analysis shows that though there is some support for consumer and goods firms being more transactional and business and service firms being more relational, there are many exceptions. The results also show that firms can be grouped into those whose marketing practices are predominantly transactional, predominantly relational, or a transactional/relational hybrid. Each group constitutes approximately one-third of the sample and includes all types of firms (consumer goods, consumer services, business-tobusiness goods, and business-to-business services). This suggests that marketing practices are pluralistic and managerial practice has not shifted from transactional to relational approaches per se. Nicole E.A s with most organizational processes, the nature and practice of marketing has evolved over recent decades. The academic field has also developed considerably, and there is a fuller understanding of the complexities of marketing practice in different types of firms and market contexts. Distinct subfields have now emerged within the discipline, reflecting research interests in areas such as business-to-business, services marketing, and, most recently, relationship marketing. Although these developments have enriched the understanding of marketing, there are still certain unresolved issues. Although business-tobusiness and services marketing are treated as distinct areas for examination (as evidenced by the variety of specialist journals, textbooks, and courses on both topics) and anecdotal reports indicate that they differ from consumer and goods marketing in terms of their practical implementation, little empirical data demonstrating their distinctiveness are available. Similarly, few empirical studies compare marketing issues across customer and product contexts, fewer still examine marketing practices per se, and none involve comparative research across a combination of market and product types. Finally, although relationships have long been of interest in the business-to-business and services literature, the extant comparative research has been conducted solely in the more traditional, transactional context of the marketing mix.These issues take on particular importance given Day and Montgomery's (1999) view that a better understanding of how firms relate to their markets is fundamental to the marketing field and their observation that the field has shifted its emphasis from transactional to relational exchanges. However, the practice of relational marketing has not been examined relative to the practice of transactional marketing, nor have the specific approaches implemented by different types of firms been examined in a comparative or cross-national setting. As such, providing empirical data on the contemporary marketing practices of a cross-section of firms, serving different types of customers with different product offers and from several cou...

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