Thorsten Gruber

Thorsten Gruber
Loughborough University | Lough · School of Business and Economics

Dipl-Oec, MBA, PhD

About

90
Publications
212,207
Reads
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9,936
Citations
Introduction
Thorsten Gruber is Professor and Chair in Marketing and Service Management at Loughborough University. He is the Director of the Centre for Service Management (CSM). Thorsten received his PhD and MBA from the University of Birmingham. His work has been published in journals such as Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Service Management, and Industrial Marketing Management.
Additional affiliations
February 2013 - present
Loughborough University
Description
  • Professor of Marketing and Service Management
November 2006 - January 2013
University of Manchester
Description
  • Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Service Management

Publications

Publications (90)
Article
Full-text available
Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used to measure the academic impact of academics. Ther...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – Despite efforts by researchers and managers to better link marketing activities with business financial outcomes, there is general agreement that by and large chief marketing officers (CMOs) (and marketing in general) have lost strategic decision-making influence within organizations. The purpose of this paper is to understand the causes...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review what we know – and don't know – about Generation Y's use of social media and to assess the implications for individuals, firms and society. Design/methodology/approach The paper distinguishes Generation Y from other cohorts in terms of systematic differences in values, preferences and behavior that ar...
Article
Service networks represent an often used but less often defined construct. As part of the Industrial Marketing Management Special Issue on Services Networks we provide an overview of different ways of understanding services networks, particularly from a business marketing and a services systems perspective. We provide our own definition of services...
Article
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This empirical paper presents the results of a detailed case-study investigation of co-creation in radical service innovation. The rationale for the paper is that detailed interventions must be tracked to offer a realistic account of how co-creation occurs. This provides a strong empirical contribution to the emerging body of scholars developing th...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Robots are predicted to have a profound impact on the service sector. The emergence of robots has attracted increasing interest from business scholars and practitioners alike. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of the business literature about the impact of service robots on customers and employees with the objective of guidi...
Chapter
Full-text available
Due to rapid developments of service robots, artificial intelligence and other new technologies (including big data, analytics, speech recognition, biometrics, mobile and cloud technologies, and geo-tagging) the service sector is facing a new wave of digitalization, including at the customer interface. Service robots, defined as system-based autono...
Article
Purpose Elevating the human experience (HX) through research collaborations is the purpose of this article. ServCollab facilitates and supports service research collaborations that seek to reduce human suffering and improve human well-being. Design/methodology/approach To catalyze this initiative, the authors introduce ServCollab's three human rig...
Article
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This editorial calls for greater use of academic-practitioner workshops to co-create value for academics, practitioners and wider network actors through promotion of research relevance and sharing of problems, ideas and data. It describes how one such workshop, the 2nd Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact Workshop focusing on the design and d...
Article
Purpose:This paper aims to discuss the strategic role of telehealth technologies in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: This is a viewpoint paper, based on opportune information published and discussed by scholars and managers from different sources; the authors gathered this information to discuss the implications of teleh...
Article
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In extreme circumstances such as pandemics, the presence of patients in hospital emergency departments becomes untenable. Healthcare professionals and organizations worldwide are leaning on technology as a crucial ally to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. This article focuses on the positive impact of telemedicine for helping service provision, from...
Article
This editorial calls for greater use of academic-practitioner workshops to co-create value for academics, practitioners and wider network actors through promotion of research relevance and sharing of problems, ideas and data. It describes how one such workshop, the 2nd Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact Workshop focusing on the design and d...
Article
The phrase the “customer is always right” assumes that customers provide universal benefits for firms. However, in recent years, customer deviance is on the rise and the academic literature has provided little insight into the drivers of deviance, the actual behaviors, and strategies for how managers can better manage a customer base that cannot be...
Article
Social innovations, which increasingly take place in inter-organizational networks, occur in environments characterized by resource scarcity. To secure access to resources, social innovators need to establish legitimacy for their initiatives. Yet, empirical work investigating the process of establishing legitimacy for social innovation – also known...
Chapter
Kollaborativer Konsum, der durch eigentumsersetzende Dienstleistungen ermöglicht wird, ist eine Form der Markttransaktion, die zunehmend verbreitet ist. Im vorliegend Beitrag wird zunächst kollaborativer Konsum von verwandten Konstrukten abgegrenzt. Hierzu werden drei Kriterien herangezogen: (1) Anzahl und Typ von Akteuren, (2) Art des Austausches,...
Article
Purpose This paper aims to discuss the strategic role of telehealth technologies in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This is a viewpoint paper, based on opportune information published and discussed by scholars and managers from different sources; the authors gathered this information to discuss the implications of teleh...
Poster
Full-text available
The full paper can be downloaded from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326623268_Brave_New_World_Service_Robots_in_the_Frontline Purpose – The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century...
Article
Full-text available
>>> Purpose – The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the 18th century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, bigdata and biometrics will...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance and extend the understanding of the underresearched concept of personal positive customer feedback (PCF). By comparing and contrasting front-line employees’ (FLEs) and customers’ perspectives, this study aims to develop a deeper understanding of the main elements, characteristics of...
Article
Full-text available
Collaborative consumption (CC) is an increasingly prevalent form of exchange. CC occurs within a triangle of actors: a platform provider (e.g., Uber), a peer service provider (e.g., an Uber driver) and a customer. The platform provider's main role is matchmaking, so that a customer can access assets of a peer service provider. This paper has three...
Article
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Purpose This paper aims to outline the purpose, planning, development and delivery of the “1st Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact workshop: Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Big Data” held at Alliance Manchester Business School on 18th and 19th January 2016, at which four subsequent papers were initially developed. Design/methodolog...
Chapter
This paper extends the understanding of positive customer feedback. Technological advances suggest future trends in customer feedback management will encompass ever advanced methods of data capture and analysis. Thus, feedback is increasingly likely to contain both negative and positive sentiment, as opposed to the predominantly isolated negative c...
Article
Full-text available
Collaborative consumption (CC) is an increasingly prevalent form of exchange. CC occurs within a triangle of actors: a platform provider (e.g., Uber), a peer service provider (e.g., an Uber driver) and a customer. The platform provider’s main role is matchmaking, so that a customer can access assets of a peer service provider. This paper has three...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to create a movement within the service research community that aspires to help the billions of impoverished people across the world achieve better service from each other, from their communities, from corporations, from their governments, and from nongovernmental organizations. The authors believe every human...
Article
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This research explores the dark side of value co-creation (VCC) in B2B service networks. Whilst VCC is attracting a great deal of academic attention and a number of studies have highlighted the benefits of VCC, researchers often fail to consider the potentially negative consequences of VCC, especially in the context of business networks. This study...
Article
Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used to measure the academic impact of academics. Ther...
Chapter
With robots increasingly considered as viable service agents, marketers must explore the nature of value co-creation during service interactions and the consequences for the wider nature of relationships between service providers and customers. This study investigates the nature of the direct interaction between humans and robots and the implicatio...
Chapter
Recently, Woodruff and Flint (2006) have backed Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) service-dominant (S-D) logic model stressing the role of value as a customer experiential phenomenon. According to the model, value is not embedded in products or services but always “value-in-use”, which means that customers experience value during interactions with service o...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – Front-line employee (FLE) well-being is an under-researched field. Contrasting the prevailing view that Positive Customer Feedback (PCF) can only have ‘positive’ impacts, this study aims to answer the counterintuitive question: Could the apparently positive construct ‘Positive Customer Feedback’ have a negative impact on the well-being of...
Article
This study explores the complaint management expectations of 72 British and 74 German organizational buyers using automated online means-end laddering and a Hierarchical Value Map presentation. It conceptualizes the links between expected complaint resolution attributes by the buyer (i.e., means) and the buyer’s value perceptions (i.e., ends). Unli...
Conference Paper
In this paper we highlight a complementary approach to examining users' preferences surrounding robot interaction. We introduce widely used concepts and methods from the field of marketing in order to gain deeper insights into user decision-making processes. The study focuses on potential interactions between older adults and robots. The preliminar...
Chapter
The market for green and ethical clothing represents a less researched but challenging area, as this green product category is driven by multiple personal end-goals. A review of ethical and eco clothing literature reveals a blur of terms and concepts (Thomas 2008) and confusion about what consumers truly value in ethical clothing (Niinimäki 2010) a...
Article
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Purpose – Adopting the transformative service research (TSR) perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of positive customer feedback on the well-being of front-line employees, companies, and society. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the overlooked area of “positive feedback” is explored resulting in the development of t...
Article
Full-text available
Complexity surrounding the holistic nature of customer experience has made measuring customer perceptions of interactive service experiences challenging. At the same time, advances in technology and changes in methods for collecting explicit customer feedback are generating increasing volumes of unstructured textual data, making it difficult for ma...
Conference Paper
We propose a 'Value-Dominant Logic' approach to complement HRI research by integrating two well-known user-centric methodologies from the field of marketing. From the results of laddering interviews accompanied by a visual projective technique we show that consumer value perceptions of robots in a retail service environment are of a paradoxical nat...
Conference Paper
The Special session aimed at challenging the established theoretical focus and extending the analytical realm of prior service research.
Article
Recently, Gruber, Abosag, Reppel, and Szmigin’s [(2011). Analysing the preferred characteristics of frontline employees dealing with customer complaints – a crossnational Kano study. The TQM Journal (Kano Special Issue), 23(2), 128–144]. Kano study revealed that complaining customers in Saudi Arabia are less difficult to delight than UK customers....
Article
Despite decades of research on self-service technology (SST), there are still only limited numbers of studies conducted in emerging markets (Ostrom et al., 2010). In order to help close this surprising gap in the literature, two studies were conducted in an emerging Eastern European country: an exploratory investigation with 20 in-depth semi-struct...
Conference Paper
This research aims to gain a deeper understanding of the desired qualities and behaviors that undergraduate business students should possess during classroom service encounters. An understanding of these characteristics and the underlying constructs behind these expectations hold practical implications for higher education institutions interested i...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this study is to expand understanding of satisfying service encounters. In particular, this research study will investigate both parties of the service encounter (customers and frontline employees). A dyadic approach will help to identify whether customer expectations differ from what contact employees believe customers desire from the s...
Article
Purpose. Service managers and researchers are especially interested in Generation Y’s social media usage because it may be a harbinger of how people will behave in the future. The purpose of this paper is to review what we know – and don’t know – about Generation Y’s use of social media and to assess the implications for individuals, firms and soci...
Article
Full-text available
This research uses the Kano model of satisfaction to investigate professor characteristics that create student satisfaction as well as those attributes that can cause their dissatisfaction. Kano questionnaires were handed out to 104 undergraduate students at a university in the Southwest and to 147 undergraduate students at a university in the Midw...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the nature of service recovery encounters, particularly the qualities and behaviours that male and female students expect from professors in personal service recovery encounters. For this purpose, 40 semi-standardized laddering interviews were conducted (with 20 male and 20 female respondents) in order to gain a deeper understan...
Article
Full-text available
With the expansion of ethical consumption, there is an increased need to understand the variety of consumer motives for consumer engagement in such behaviour. For the rapidly growing area of ethical clothing, this study explores consumers’ desired consumption outcomes and personal values that drive ethical product preferences. Analysis of data obta...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the nature of service recovery encounters, particularly the qualities and behaviours that male and female students expect from professors in personal service recovery encounters. For this purpose, 40 semi-standardized laddering interviews were conducted (with 20 male and 20 female respondents) in order to gain a deeper understan...
Article
Laddering is a well-established research technique in the social sciences which provides rich data to help understand means-end considerations otherwise hidden from quantitative research. It does this through revealing relationships between the attributes of individuals, objects or services (i.e., means), the consequences these attributes represent...
Article
Full-text available
It is now well recognised that an effective service recovery system plays a crucial role in service organisations. However, the importance of such systems has not yet been acknowledged by the higher education industry. Given the need for more research on service recovery expectations of students, this exploratory study attempts to shed light on wha...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to uncover the desired qualities and behaviours that patients believe general practitioners (GPs) should have in medical (service recovery) encounters. In particular, the authors try to reveal the qualities and behaviours of GPs that patients value, to understand the underlying benefits that they look for duri...
Article
Full-text available
According to service-dominant logic (S-D logic), all providers are service providers, and service is the fundamental basis of exchange. Value is co-created with customers and assessed on the basis of value-in-context. However, the extensive literature on S-D logic could benefit from paying explicit attention to the fact that both service exchange a...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose This paper seeks to use the Kano model to gain a deeper understanding of attributes of effective frontline employees dealing with customer complainants in personal interactions. Previous research revealed that excitement factors deteriorate to basic factors over time. This research aims to investigate whether the same phenomenon holds true...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Using a realist perspective, this paper seeks to investigate how complaining customers want to be treated by frontline employees in personal complaint handling encounters. For this purpose, an exploratory research study using the qualitative laddering interviewing technique was regarded as appropriate as it allows researchers to gain a deep...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose This paper aims to explore satisfactory and dissatisfactory student‐professor encounters in higher education from a student's perspective. The critical incident technique (CIT) is used to categorise positive and negative student‐professor interactions and to reveal quality dimensions of professors. Design/methodology/approach An explorator...
Article
Full-text available
Increasingly, higher education institutions are realising that higher education could be regarded as a business-like service industry and they are beginning to focus more on meeting or even exceeding the needs of their students. Recent research findings suggest that the factors that create student satisfaction with teaching (‘teaching satisfiers’)...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of the attributes of effective complaint management in business‐to‐business relationships, and to reveal the underlying benefits that buying organizations are looking for when complaining. Design/methodology/approach A semi‐standardized qualitative technique called laddering was a...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose This paper aims to investigate how students perceive the services they are offered at a German university and how satisfied they are with them. Design/methodology/approach An evaluation study using a new tool to measure 15 dimensions of student satisfaction at an institutional level that covers most aspects of student life was used. It was...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose This paper seeks to explore the nature of complaint satisfaction with particular emphasis on the qualities and behaviours that male and female customers value during personal complaint‐handling service encounters. Design/methodology/approach A semi‐standardized qualitative technique called laddering was used to reveal the cognitive structu...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of complaint satisfaction, specifically to examine how contact employees should behave and which qualities they should possess. The study also aims to explore the comparability of results obtained from two laddering methods, as the alternative techniques may lead to different sets of attrib...
Article
This study explores complaint management expectations in business relationships, with particular emphasis on the qualities and behaviours that affect buying companies as part of the complaint handling encounter with a supplier, specifically the business logic or motivation which drives their expectations. An exploratory empirical study uses a hard...
Article
Obwohl mehrere ForscherInnen bereits die Nützlichkeit des Internets zur Durchführung qualitativer Forschungsstudien entdeckt haben, weisen AutorInnen wie z.B. Comley (2002) darauf hin, dass qualitative Onlineforschung immer noch weniger betrieben wird als quantitative Onlineforschung. O'Connor und Madge (2003) sind zudem der Ansicht, dass das Thema...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on complaint satisfaction with a particular emphasis on the qualities and behaviours that affect customers during personal complaint handling encounters. Design/methodology/approach Following a literature review of complaint satisfaction and the role of customer contact employees in complaint encounter...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to thoroughly explain how qualitative researchers can design and conduct online interviews to investigate interesting consumer phenomena. Design/methodology/approach – A semi‐standardized qualitative technique called laddering was applied successfully to an online environment. Laddering allows researchers to...
Article
The study aims to develop a deeper understanding of the teaching qualities of effective lecturers that students desire and to uncover the constructs that underlie these desire expectations to reveal the underlying benefits that students look for. An empirical study using the means–end approach and two laddering techniques (personal interviews and l...
Chapter
Obwohl mehrere Forscherinnen bereits die Nützlichkeit des Internets zur Durchführung qualitativer Forschungsstudien entdeckt haben, weisen Autorinnen wie z.B. (2002) darauf hin, dass qualitative Onlineforschung immer noch weniger betrieben wird als quantitative Onlineforschung. O’Connor und Madge (2003) sind zudem der Ansicht, dass das Thema der qu...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this research is to aim to develop a deeper understanding of the teaching qualities of effective lecturers that students desire and to uncover the constructs that underlie these desire expectations and reveal the underlying benefits for which students look. Design/methodology/approach – A semi-standardized qualitative techn...
Article
Purpose The aim of this paper is to explore the potential for learning from customers of a market leader through qualitative marketing research. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents findings from a study that applies a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. An online variation of an existing qualitative research me...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the nature of complaint satisfaction with a particular emphasis on the qualities and behaviours that affect customers during the personal complaint handling encounter. The paper reviews the literature on complaint satisfaction and the role of the contact employee in the complaint encounter. An empirical study using the means-end...
Article
This paper explores the nature of complaint satisfaction with particular emphasis on the qualities and behaviours that affect male and female customers during personal complaint handling encounters. An explorative study using the means-end approach and qualitative laddering techniques provides a deeper understanding of attributes of effective custo...