What goes around comes around: Understanding trust-value dilemmas of market relationships

The emerging cultural, societal, and environmental milieu of the twenty-first-century marketplace presents coping challenges for even strong and well-established companies. Few, if any, attempts have been made to examine systematically a firm's symbiotic link with society by focusing on the complexity and interconnectedness of its disparate market relationships. To facilitate a grounded approach to such modeling, the authors use a trust-value framework to analyze market relationships, the interconnections among them, and the trust-value dilemmas that arise in the context of two case studies: (1) the 3M company's decision to pull Scotchgard from the market and (2) the Los Angeles Unified School District versus the Coca-Cola Company regarding the sale of soft drinks on school premises. The authors chronologically assembled and systematically analyzed data from public, secondary, and industry sources, using relationship marketing theory principles to develop the individual case studies. The analyses indicate that the trust-value framework is a useful foundation for theorizing and empirically examining the complexity of a firm's market relationships by revealing interesting trust-value dilemmas and dynamics that connect the disparate relationships. The authors discuss implications for research and practice.