Frontiers 2018 in Austin, Texas, served a variety of perspectives into service research After listening three inspiring days full of plenaries and presentations by the best service researchers around the world in trendy and boiling hot Austin, Texas, it became clear that there are two themes above others that interest service scholars at the moment:…

To start with a metaphorical view: imagine that you suffer from bad eyesight, but you have come used to it because it has slowly become worse (as it usually does). Proper prescription lenses would do the thing and make you see everything clearer. First you have to realize that you do not see very clearly….

Ten years ago, my friend Martin and I were in the midst of finalizing our master’s thesis (yes, in Sweden we write them in pairs!) on the topic “the electronic customer relationship”. In hindsight, a better term would probably have been “the digital customer relationship”. Anyhow, we realized that digitalization is transforming business, and hence…

In a CSR – corporate social responsibility – conference in Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University I present myself, and my fellow researcher says: “and so what are you doing in the CSR conference then?” Rightly so, since the born of marketing and despite the different trends and movements, marketing has been considered generally…

Design and business, which seem to be completely different from each other, turn out to be firmly related.   As a person coming from business background, the Master degree in Business Design Management completely changed my mindset and value toward business and design. Before taking the program, I even thought that they would teach us…

  Marketing scholars hold an interesting position: They often know well ahead before practioners which are the trends and concepts that will conquer the field of marketing in the coming years, and which terms will turn to buzzwords that business consultants will write books and preach about, in their seminars.   What scholars often do…

“The botanist looking at a daffodil has no reason to dispute the right of the poet to look at the same object in a very different manner. There are many ways of playing. The point is not that one denies other people’s games but that one is clear about the rules of one’s own.” Those…

In our new book, Service Strategy in Action (S2iA), Professor Wolfgang Ulaga, AT&T Professor of Services Leadership and Co-Executive Director at the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University, and I show how to shift from a goods-centric business model to a service-savvy one. For over a decade, we have accompanied numerous firms on…

I recently took a PhD-level course about the evolution of marketing theory. While learning about the origins of marketing as a concept, I also started to reflect upon my own thesis topic – branding – through a historical lens. While marketing and branding might typically be considered modern practices in society, they actually have roots…