Handbook of Service Marketing Research

Abstract

Handbook of Service Marketing Research Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang, eds. Edward Elgar (Cheltenham, UK/Northampton, MA, USA), 2014 Hardcover, 615 pp., USD 266.00Pile cliche atop hyperbole as high as you like, and you will still find it difficult to overestimate the importance of services to the success of today's firm. Rust and Huang have assembled a collection of the leading scholars and business leaders in services marketing to provide the current state of the art as well as a path forward that will be of value to scholars, students, teachers, and practitioners alike. The editors make a convincing case for the idea that the service revolution is transforming theory and practice in marketing, from considerations of where the source of value lies to the ways in which firms measure success. The Handbook of Service Marketing Research's seven sections (in addition to the editors' introductory chapter) include three focused on elements of customer centricity, three on the ways in which traditional areas and functions of marketing are being reshaped by the service revolution, and a final section on service for societal well-being.Part II consists of five chapters devoted to consideration of customer relationships and loyalty, beginning with the end in mind (as the late Stephen Covey might have put it) by considering customer relationships and loyalty. In Building relationships between service organizations and customers Bolton and Christopher lay out basic concepts and a research agenda for understanding and measuring customer lifetime duration, discussing both antecedents to customer lifetime duration and the relationship between CLD and financial outcomes. Two additional chapters, one by Oliver and one by Aksoy, Keiningham, and Oliver investigate loyalty, its sources, and its variations. Oliver investigates the historical views and the biological, psychological, and social origins of loyalty, while Aksoy et al. delve into several forms or manifestations of loyalty, not limited to consumer loyalty. Meanwhile, Dagger and Danaher compare five relationship each incorporating six widely-studied constructs: trust, commitment, satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty, behavioral loyalty, and word-of-mouth. The authors find that the model that performs best has attitudinal loyalty and WOM driving behavioral loyalty; attitudinal loyalty and WOM are driven in turn by commitment, trust, and satisfaction.Perhaps the most thought-provoking section of the handbook is Part III, Customer-Centered Metrics, where scholars, executives, and teachers who advocate the measurement of firm value by the customer (an idea just making its way into marketing textbooks, as well as into practice) will find considerable ammunition and useful additions to the toolbox. Skiera and Schulze, in Customer-based valuation: similarities and differences to traditional discounted cash flow models, present a lucid and easy-to-follow framework for the use of customer lifetime value (CLV) metrics that could find a home in the undergraduate classroom as well as the boardroom. A more elaborate CLV metric perhaps of more interest to advanced scholars, students, and practitioners is found in the subsequent chapter, CRM metrics and strategies to enhance performance in service industries, by Kumar, Umashankar, and Choi. However, the authors' contribution goes well beyond the CLV tool to discuss customer referral value, customer influence value, customer knowledge value, and customer brand value.Continuing the section, Keiningham, Aksoy, De Keyser, Lariviere, Buoye, and Williams discuss the weak relationships found between measures such as customer satisfaction (among others) and share of wallet (SOW). The authors show that a managerial focus on customer retention combined with increasing customer SOW contributes much more to firm growth than focus on customer retention alone in industries such as banking, grocery, discount retail, and credit cards. …