Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, language: English, abstract: In today's modern business environment, the development of close and long-term relationships is a strategy which aims at creating competitive advantage and the successful revival of businesses. The scientific field of marketing has created "relationship marketing" which deals with the study of these relationships. The present essay focuses on analyzing and comparing transactional and relationship marketing. It presents the IMP Group interaction approach which is considered as one of the most prevalent approaches of relationship marketing. The IMP Group approach is analyzed and more specifically its implementation in the purchasing process is studied. IBM is the company that is taken as an implementation example of the IMP Group approach. In IBM's case study relationship marketing and IMP Group approach are successfully implemented and are in full accordance with the relevant theory.