An Investigation of the Effect of Relationship Marketing on Customer Gratitude and Consumer Behavior (Case Study: The Dealerships of Saipa Corporation in Ardabil Province)

The aim of dealerships to build a long-term relationship with customers is to make further profit. Today, relationship marketing is accompanied by understanding consumer behavior and meeting their need and according to the norm of mutual relationships, customer gratitude as customer buying behavior is the beginning of a motivation or an affective commitment to compensate seller’s advantages. Therefore, this study attempts to consider the importance of customer in automobile industry and realize the effect of relationship marketing on customer gratitude and consumer behavior in dealerships of Saipa Corporation. The present study is applicable in terms of aim and correlational in terms of descriptive method. The statistical population includes all the customers of dealerships of Saipa Corporation in Ardabil Province. The sample size was calculated through Cochran’s formula (384 customers) and to raise the confidence level, 400 people were selected randomly to answer the questionnaire. In order to analyze the descriptive findings, SPSS 20 Software was applied and to test the hypotheses, LISREL 8.8 Software was used. According to the results, the effect of relationship marketing on customer gratitude (path coefficient = 0.96) and consumer behavior (path coefficient = 0.13) is confirmed, which indicates the positive and significant effect on the measured variable in dealerships of Saipa Corporation in Ardabil Province.