Customer Identities: Customers as Commercial Friends, Customer Coworkers or Business Acquaintances

In an effort to better understand relationships between salespersons and their customers, in-depth interviews with salespeople were used to establish a classification schema of customer types or identities. Using identity theory, three categories of customer identities were identified and partially supported: commercial friends, customer coworkers and business acquaintances. The identities can serve as vehicles for further developing theory and research concerning salesperson-customer dyads as well as for investigating the genesis of relationships between salespeople and customers.