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Investigates the characteristics of the regular customer cards of four major Finnish retail organizations in the daily product sector with respect to the basic characteristics of (customer) relationship marketing. The purpose is to study whether, and to what degree, relationship marketing is the right framework in this regard for today’s retailing in Finland, and how this “new paradigm” can be applied in future to improve the effectiveness of the regular customer cards. Regular customer cards are found to correspond to relationship marketing mainly on its lowest level, and thus at a level where the benefits of relationship marketing are lowest as well. Alternatively, the regular customer systems and programmes are not yet developed enough to take advantage fully of the possibilities of relationship marketing. There is a lot of potential to improve regular customer systems and cards towards more relationship‐based marketing in the daily product sector in retailing by customization, augmentation, and internal marketing.

Previous results have indicated that some consumers are less satisfied with mundane retail outlets and require more exuberant entertainment. Other consumers, however, do not make for “fun shoppers” and are not likely to in the future. Concentrates on the two largest groups found in the study: the “new‐type shoppers” and the “traditional shoppers”. They were similar in terms of their sociodemographic characteristics and almost so in their choice criteria for a place to shop. They differed only in their desire for experience and recreation while shopping. Examines their psychographic characteristics, behavioural tendencies and actual behaviour patterns in order to deepen the picture of those two groups. Discusses retailers′ activities concerning the personality and image of their outlets in the context of image congruence between a consumer and a retailer outlet.