The client gestures that earn gratitude are the ones that feel chosen

By Liv Saville, Head of Growth at Worthington

Relationship marketing·September 23, 2026·7 min read

A 2009 study in the Journal of Marketing found that gratitude, alongside trust and commitment, is how a seller's relationship-building turns into more business. In that research, people felt more grateful for a gesture when they believed the seller chose to make it for them, and when it arrived at a moment they needed the help.

Gratitude did more of the work than most models assume

For years the standard explanation of relationship marketing has rested on trust and commitment. You invest in the relationship, the customer comes to trust you and wants to stay, and the business follows. A 2006 meta-analysis by Palmatier and colleagues pulled together the research on how well relationship marketing works and found that relationship investment had a large direct effect on performance, which suggested other pathways were at work beyond the ones researchers usually measured. The 2009 paper cites that result as its starting point.

In The Role of Customer Gratitude in Relationship Marketing, Robert Palmatier, Cheryl Burke Jarvis, Jennifer Bechkoff and Frank Kardes tested whether gratitude was the missing piece, using two studies. The first was a lab experiment in which 155 business students read a short scenario about a clothing store employee going out of their way to help them choose an outfit. The second was a field survey of 446 business customers of 31 sales firms selling industrial products across North America, matched against the sellers' own sales records. For 126 of those customers, the researchers went back a year later to get the following year's sales growth.

In both studies, relationship investments led to gratitude, and in the field study gratitude-based behaviour from customers was linked to a bigger share of their purchasing going to the seller, and to higher revenue and sales growth. The authors also report that across both studies and four different outcome measures, the effect of gratitude on seller performance was on average 23% greater than the effect of commitment. The authors conclude that research leaving gratitude out may systematically underestimate what relationship marketing returns.

Gratitude depends on how the gesture reads to the client

In the experiment, the researchers held the gesture itself constant and changed only how it was framed, to see which perceptions made people more grateful for exactly the same help. For agents, that design separates what you do for a client from how the client reads it.

Participants felt more grateful when they believed the employee had the freedom to help and chose to, rather than doing something the job required, and when the motive seemed kind rather than self-serving. Need mattered too: people who needed the help at that moment were more grateful for it. The last factor tested, how much the seller was risking by making the effort, pointed the same way but wasn't statistically significant. The authors illustrate that factor with a real estate agent giving a day-long tour to an out-of-town job candidate who might never take the job and move.

The authors write that benefits everyone receives, that are given because the customer asked, that match a competitor's offer or that are built into the service may generate little gratitude, and they argue that formal loyalty programs with written rules lack the sense of free will that makes people grateful. They also note that letting a customer know the salesperson works on commission undermines the sense that the gesture was kindly meant.

Neither study was about real estate. One used students reacting to a retail scenario and the other used business customers of industrial sales firms, so how I apply it to agents and their clients below is my own reading. The authors themselves say the findings can't be extended to purely social relationships without more evidence.

What this means for how you look after past clients

The past-client programs agents I've spoken to describe are mostly built from things every client gets, like the closing gift and the anniversary card. Those keep you visible, and if this research holds for your clients the way it did for retail shoppers and business buyers, they're also the gestures least likely to make anyone feel grateful, since a client is likely to see anything identical and scheduled as part of the service.

So I'd look at your program in two layers. Keep the scheduled touches, which do the work of staying top of mind, and don't expect them to create gratitude. Then set aside some attention for gestures that are clearly chosen for one person. That might be passing on the name of a good roofer when a client mentions a leak, or sending a note about a school boundary change to the family you know is weighing their options. Neither costs much, and in both cases the client can see you thought of them specifically. The 2006 meta-analysis also found that relationship marketing was more effective when the relationship was built with an individual person than with a selling firm. My reading is that this favours agents, since clients usually choose an agent as a person, whatever brokerage they're with.

Timing is the next thing I'd plan around. People in the experiment who needed the help were more grateful for the same gesture, and in real estate, need tends to cluster around moments you can see coming, such as the first months in a new home or a life change a client mentioned in passing. Those moments are where I'd put the chosen gestures, like the name of a trusted contractor in the month after move-in.

On motive, the authors recommend giving customers a chance to reciprocate soon after a gesture, and they're clear it shouldn't refer back to the favour or read as a way of paying for it. In my reading, a thoughtful check-in that closes with a referral request does exactly that, and the client is left wondering whether the kindness was a setup for the ask. I'd keep the gesture and the referral request in separate conversations.

Chosen gestures depend on remembering what each client said

Knowing that one client mentioned a leak and another is thinking about schools means holding hundreds of small details across hundreds of relationships, and those details usually live in an agent's head or a note that never gets reread. Worthington keeps those details on each contact's record and spots the opening when one comes up, then drafts a message in your voice for you to review and send. He also knows when to follow up, when to prompt for a referral and when to say nothing at all.

Keep the closing gifts and anniversary cards for visibility, and put the extra effort into noticing what each client needs and when. In Palmatier's research, gratitude followed from help people saw as freely chosen and kindly meant, and gratitude was linked to more business.

Worthington draws on research like this to shape a nurturing strategy for each of your clients. Join the waitlist