Stephen W. Brown

Arizona State University | ASU · Center for Services Leadership

Purpose A small group of pioneering founders led the creation and early evolution of the service research field. Decades later, this article shares timeless service wisdom from ten of those pioneering founders. Design/methodology/approach Bowen and Fisk specified three criteria by which to identify a pioneering founder. In total, 11 founders met t...

This research examines how branded service encounters, in which frontline service employee behavior is aligned with a firm's brand positioning, may positively affect customer responses to brands. Across two brand personality contexts, Study 1 demonstrates that employee–brand alignment increases overall brand evaluations and customer-based brand equ...

In a factorial experiment, subjects, most of whom possessed managerial experience, were given information about a salesperson and asked to rate his ability on the job. As predicted, the subjects tended to overutilize effort information and underutilize task difficulty information in making their evaluations. The research reveals that cognitive bias...

Increasingly, service innovation is a source of competitive differentiation for product-dominant companies such as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. However, the relative intangibility of services has led to uncertainty concerning how to apply product innovation expertise to the services space. We argue that meaningful service innovation...

Many service interactions require customers to actively participate, yet customers often do not participate at levels that optimize their outcomes, particularly in health care. To gain insight into how customers shape a service experience with highly uncertain outcomes, we construct a model on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The...

The secret to true service innovation lies in shifting focus away from the service solution back to the customer. Rather than asking, “How are we doing?” managers must ask, “How is the customer doing?” For far too many businesses, service innovation means making incremental improvements to existing services. While a focus on improving current servi...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review key research contributions that may be useful for rethinking service innovation. Service innovation is not a monolithic construct; therefore, the opportunities for further research are multidimensional and interdisciplinary. Design/methodology/approach A summary analysis of extant literature identifie...

Purpose Recent discussions of the service‐dominant logic (S‐D logic) and the creation of a multidisciplinary service science highlight the need for a paradigmatic discussion that provides directions for ongoing service research. This article aims to examine different epistemological foundations and proposes a framework to describe and better unders...

Given the significant, sustained growth in services experienced worldwide, Arizona State University’s Center for Services Leadership embarked on an 18-month effort to identify and articulate a set of global, interdisciplinary research priorities focused on the science of service. Diverse participation from academics in a variety of disciplines work...

Offshore outsourcing of business processes is a rapidly increasing global phenomenon that requires a greater reliance on the effective development of strategic alliances and inter-firm relationships. The stakeholders involved in these service purchases influence the success or failure of the buyer-supplier relationship. This article examines the ke...

In this paper, we draw on forgiveness theory to explain the long-term reactions of customers to service failures. We find that service failures trigger significant avoidance and revenge. Over time, however, these negative motivations gradually decrease. Time has complex effects. Even though avoidance and revenge decrease with time, probing the time...

Purpose The purpose of this paper was to isolate and characterize organizational factors that enable the formation of high‐performing business services in product manufacturing firms. Design/methodology/approach This study employed a case research design. In total, 32 depth interviews were conducted with 11 different managers from a Global 100 inf...

Service innovations reportedly involve innovating intangible products, but this article argues for a more radical service-logic perspective that challenges the traditional, attribute-based view of innovation. Rather than innovating products and services, the focus here shifts toward innovating customers' value co-creation roles. This article presen...

The service-dominant logic (S-D logic) provides a novel and valuable theoretical perspective that necessitates a rethinking and reevaluation of the conventional literature on innovation. This literature is built upon a goods-dominant logic and has resulted in a restricted and out-moded perspective that overlooks many major discontinuous innovations...

Services dominate the world's established economies (such as those of the US, Germany, and Finland) and are becoming increasingly important in developing economies, including those of China and India. Yet most companies, national governments, and universities do not put much energy into service research, innovation, or education. This ironic juxtap...

With the explosive growth of services in economies worldwide comes the growing recognition of a need for trans-disciplinary research, new business models, and innovative degree programs to propel innovation in services. This paper paints a picture of the history as well as new initiatives at Arizona State University that are aimed at addressing the...

Services dominate the world’s established economies such as the U.S., Germany and Finland and are becoming increasingly important in developing economies including China and India. Yet most companies, national governments, and universities do not put much energy into service research, innovation or education. This ironic juxtaposition of facts has...

The growth of services in economies around the world has vast implications for business practice, academic knowledge creation, and education. Service industries have dominated the U.S. and other established economies for decades. Increasingly, manufacturers and IT companies are also shifting to a focus on services as growth and profit engines for t...

The pioneering efforts of Arizona State University illustrate what can be accomplished when universities worldwide address the need to create comprehensive interdisciplinary curricula for services science.

Using a sample of 281 frontline service employees of a national retail bank, we test a social exchange model of antecedents of three dimensions of customer-oriented boundary-spanning behaviors suggested by prior boundary-spanning and services marketing/management literatures: external representation, internal influence, and service delivery. In sup...

Customization strategies aimed at providing customers with individually tailored products and services are growing in popularity. In a service context, the responsibility for customization frequently falls on the shoulders of front-line customer contact employees. Few marketing scholars, however, have considered what it means to be adaptive in thes...

The article presents several essays pertaining to marketing including Stephen W. Brown's "When Executives Speak, We Should Listen and Act Differently," Frederick E. Webster Jr.'s "Back to the Future: Integrating Marketing as Tactics, Strategy, and Organizational Culture," and William L. Wilkie's "Needed: A Larger Sense of Marketing and Scholarship....

Extant literature is almost unanimous in suggesting that managers in goods-dominant firms should integrate services into their core market offers. Furthermore, in actual practice, numerous firms are striving with mixed results to become “solutions providers” by adding services to their portfolio of tangible goods. The literature does not, however,...

Electronic commerce is an increasingly popular business model with a wide range of tools available to firms. An application that is becoming more common is the use of self-service technologies (SSTs), such as telephone bank-ing, automated hotel checkout, and online investment trading, whereby customers produce services for them-selves without assis...

Comments on an article which discussed the relationships between purchase intentions and purchase behavior of consumers. Discussion on the tendency of commonplace procedures and models, such as ACNielsen BASES model, to overestimate and overstate aggregate purchase probabilities; Findings of a survey of the latent purchase intentions for both surve...

See page 10 of the following document: https://msbfile03.usc.edu/digitalmeasures/macinnis/intellcont/them_vs_us05-1.pdf

A common characteristic of knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) firms is that clients routinely play a critical role in co-producing the service solution along with the service provider. This can have a profound effect on both the quality of the service delivered as well as the client's ultimate satisfaction with the knowledge-based service...

The authors investigate three types of customer-oriented boundary-spanning behaviors (COBSBs) a frontline service employee may perform that are associated with linking a service organization to its potential or actual customers: external representation, internal influence, and service delivery. The authors propose and test a withdrawal model to exp...

Services marketing has grown and matured as an area of study, but it's research remains mired in a consumer market context. The growth in services marketing practice today, however, is in business markets. This article strives to increase the awareness of this contemporary phenomenon and encourage scholarly work in business-to-business services.

Delivering excellent service is a challenge for most organizations. While many aspire to it, the evidence from customer satisfaction surveys indicates that too few firms are able to deliver service excellence. On the other hand, some organizations consistently deliver excellent service. This article reviews ten lessons these benchmark service organ...

In this study, we hypothesize and empirically test the proposition that interpersonal bonds, or relationships between employees and customers, can significantly influence positive word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. Such influence may be especially true for many services, particularly in situations where a relationship has developed between the cust...

Service encounters are critical in all industries, including those that have not been traditionally defined as service industries. The increasing deployment of technology is altering the essence of service encounters formerly anchored in a “low-tech, high-touch” paradigm. This article explores the changing nature of service, with an emphasis on how...

Service recovery: Research insights and practices Service recovery is now recognized as a significant driver of customer satisfaction and loyalty and an important component of a quality management strategy (Fornell and Wernerfelt 1987; Rust, Zahorik, and Keiningham 1996; Smith, Bolton, and Wagner 1998; Tax and Brown 1998). Performing very well in r...

The influence of loyal customers can reach far beyond their proximate impact on the company. This impact is analogous to the ripple caused by a pebble tossed into a still pond. In this article we introduce the loyalty ripple effect construct and define it as the influence, both direct and indirect, customers have on a firm through (1) generating in...

Effective service recovery is vital to maintaining customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty, which contribute significantly to a company's revenues and profitability Yet most customers are dissatisfied with the way companies resolve their complaints, and most companies do not take advantage of the learning opportunities afforded by service fa...

Many companies consider investments in complaint handling as means of increasing customer commitment and building customer loyalty. Firms are not well informed, however, on how to deal successfully with service failures or the impact of complaint handling strategies. In this study, the authors find that a majority of complaining customers were diss...

Many companies consider investments in complaint handling as means of increasing customer commitment and building customer loyalty. Firms are not well informed, however, on how to deal successfully with service failures or the impact of complaint handling strategies. In this study, the authors find that a majority of complaining customers were diss...

Contact employees deliver the promises of the firm, create an image for the firm and sell the firm 's services. Leading firms and scholars propose a possible relationship between the fair treatment of these employees and excellence in service delivery. This important proposition, however, lacks much more than anecdotal evidence. An empirical invest...

Contributes to a growing body of service recovery knowledge by examining the impact of service recovery as a relationship tool, in addition to its well-accepted role as a means to enhance customer satisfaction at the transaction-specific level. Begins by providing an overview of the evolving concept of service recovery and continues by explaining t...

Service organizations are continually looking for ways to increase customer loyalty. Although loyalty to tangible goods (i.e., brand loyalty) has been studied extensively by marketing scholars, relatively little theoretical or empirical research has examined loyalty to service organizations (i.e., service loyalty). This study extends previous loyal...

The services marketing literature has developed primarily in response to managerial need. Yet, to date, it has not produced a significant body of theory that can be used to interconnect its major concepts. This article addresses that need by linking the notion of service quality (as modelled in SERVQUAL) with customer decision‐making via an adaptat...

Boundary-spanning personnel such as tax preparers, travel agents and hairdressers interface directly with customers. In their unique position, between the organization and customer, these service providers market the service to consumers while they simultaneously carry out operational functions. Both the customer and the provider bring certain expe...

Conflicting models exist in the literature of the process through which perceived quality and/or satisfaction affect behavioral intentions. Further, virtually no theoretical framework has been explicitly developed to help combine perceived-quality models with satisfaction models. This article applies a theoretical framework to help build a model th...

Offers the personal interpretations of authors as participant-observers together with a data-based analysis of the evolution of the services marketing literature. Bibliographic analysis of more than 1,000 English language, general services marketing publications, spanning four decades, provides an additional resource. Using an evolutionary metaphor...

The authors offer their personal interpretations as participant-observers together with a data-based analysis of the evolution of the services marketing literature. Bibliographic analysis of more than 1000 English-language, general services marketing publications spanning four decades provides the empirical base for the paper. Using an evolutionary...

Service innovations require a revitalising process to be viable over time. Both provider and customer satisfaction must be associated with these innovations to assure their continuing success. A framework and a model for service revitalisation are developed and then illustrated through examining the past and potential future of one of the world′s m...

Providers of professional services recently have awakened to consumer challenges, competition, and the realities of marketing. With these changes, a related and equally important issue has emerged-service quality and evaluating the service encounter. Using medical services as the primary study setting, the authors explore the concept of professiona...

Providers of professional services recently have awakened to consumer challenges, competition, and the realities of marketing. With these changes, a related and equally important issue has emerged—service quality and evaluating the service encounter. Using medical services as the primary study setting, the authors explore the concept of professiona...

Providers of professional services have recently awakened to consumer challenges, competition and the realities of marketing. Looking at the expectations and experiences of providers and consumers can provide special insight into the services evaluation process and perceived service quality. By evaluating both professionals’ and consumers’ perspect...

Providers of professional services have recently awakened to consumer challenges, competition and the realities of marketing. Looking at the expectations and experiences of providers and consumers can provide special insight into the services evaluation process and perceived service quality. By evaluating both professionals' and consumers' perspect...

The health plan industry is young but growing rapidly. Thus most of its marketing energy has been directed toward new member enrollment strategies. As health plans mature in their industry life cycle, measures to retain present members and prevent disenrollment will become increasingly important. Health plan disenrollment is indeed costly and can h...

Information technology has made possible the recognition, acquisition, organization, and controlled retention of data from sources virtually unavailable in the past. Terms such as “the information society” and “information glut” have become commonplace. High-level corporate positions with titles such as Chief Information Officer are being created i...

Performance evaluation of salespeople is examined from an attribution perspective in a field study involving sales managers. Findings support the presence of an attribution bias. Effort significantly influenced sales managers' evaluations, but task difficulty had no measurable effect on performance appraisal.

Performance evaluation of salespeople is examined from an attribution perspective in a field study involving sales managers. Findings support the presence of an attribution bias. Effort significantly influenced sales managers’ evaluations, but task difficulty had no measurable effect on performance appraisal.

In their roles as public contact personnel in health care marketing, physician office managers are involved in communicative relationships with patients. Such relationships underscore the importance of researching these individuals in their roles of producers, promoters and agents of health care services. The nature of these roles is investigated i...

Medical malpractice is a major societal, consumer, and public policy issue with wide ranging and significant litigation and cost dimensions. One approach to analyzing the medical malpractice problem is to investigate it from the perspective of consumer dissatisfaction or complaint behavior. Within this basic framework, the current research explores...

There has been little published on the topic of marketing consultants. The literature void is even more pronounced when a major source of outside expertise, the professor-consultant, is examined. The authors have surveyed marketing academicians to determine their attitudes toward consulting and the scope and nature of their consulting activities al...

Despite the frequent discussion and usage of comparative advertising. very few studies have empirically examined the phenomenon. This article reports the findings of a content analysis of 896 nationally televised advertisements. Results on the types of products compared, the competitive advantages stressed, the extent to which competition is noted,...

The literature provides little insight as to whether a difference exists between the marketing of services and goods. Most textbooks do not address the issue of possible differences. Their neglect of the topic would seem to indicate a working hypothesis that services and goods do not differ in any meaningful way. Authors of articles and books that...

The changing life styles of the American woman necessitate attention from marketing practitioners and academicians. The scope of this article is restricted to an examination of the portrayal of women in advertisements. Following a review of complaints of women in advertising and a look at selected research studies, the article deduces that the phen...

The influence of loyal customers on a company can reach far beyond their proximate impact. We view this impact as analogous to the ripple caused by a pebble tossed into a still pond. In this paper we introduce the loyalty ripple effect and describe it as the influence, both direct and indirect, customers have on a firm by encouraging new customer p...

This book represents the proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference in Services (QUIS 11) that took place from June 11 to 14, 2009, at the AutoUni in Wolfsburg, Germany. QUIS 11 attracted over 200 leading researchers and executives from all over the world. They presented and discussed topics such as Service Quality, Service Strategy, Serv...