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Many firms strive to create relationships with customers, but not all customers are motivated to build close commercial relationships. This article introduces a theoretical framework that explains how relationshipspecific attachment styles account for customers' distinct preferences for closeness and how both attachment styles and preferences for closeness influence loyalty. The authors test their predictions with survey data from 1199 insurance customers and three years of purchase records for 975 of these customers. They find that attachment styles predict customers' preferences for closeness better than established marketing variables do. Moreover, attachment styles and preferences for closeness influence loyalty intentions and behavior, controlling for established antecedents (e.g., relationship quality). Finally, exploring the underlying process, the authors show that preference for closeness partially mediates the effect of attachment styles on cross-buying behavior. This research provides novel customer segmentation criteria and actionable guidelines that managers can use to improve their ability to tailor relationship marketing activities and more effectively allocate resources to match customer preferences.

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 model is used to empirically assess how situation-specific emotions and customer participation during a health care service experience affect perceptions of the service provider. The model is tested using data from 190 medical clinic customers. Consistent with theory, results reveal that as customers’ relative affect levels become more positive, levels of participation increase as well. In turn, higher levels of positivity and participation improve customer perceptions of the quality of the service provider and satisfaction with the co-produced service experience. Implications of this research focus managers on designing services to help clients manage their emotions in ways that facilitate positivity and participation and thus improve service perceptions.

Companies today face the challenge not only of designing innovative customer-focused service strategies to compete and grow but also of translating such strategies into results through successful execution. Experience and research demonstrate the difficulty of such an execution, but little research in marketing has focused on strategy implementation, particularly at the employee level. Prior research has suggested that frontline employee participation is critical to successful innovation implementation, especially in service contexts. We develop a theoretical model to investigate the complex role of motivation in engaging employee participation in service innovation implementation and test it with field data from a real-world context. The study contributes to motivation research in marketing by adapting and extending a hierarchical conceptualization from psychology that incorporates three levels of motivation: global, contextual, and situational. We also investigate the antecedents managers can control to increase employee motivation to participate in implementation efforts and subsequently to improve participation behaviors that are critical to the successful implementation of a customer service innovation.

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 these roles and how customization behaviors can be encouraged. Drawing on marketing, organizational behavior, and psychology literatures, the authors define and empirically test antecedents of two distinct dimensions of employee adaptive behavior: interpersonal adaptive behavior and service-offering adaptive behavior. Results indicate that an employee’s level of customer knowledge, certain personality predispositions, and intrinsic motivation positively influence the propensity to adapt both their interpersonal style and the actual service offering. Implications for market segmentation, employee selection, training, and motivation are offered.

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 equity, with more pronounced results for unfamiliar brands. Study 2 shows that conceptual fluency underlies the effect of employee-brand alignment on overall brand evaluations for unfamiliar brands. Study 3 reveals that employee authenticity enhances the effectiveness of employee-brand alignment. Finally, a critical incident study (Study 4) extends the generalizability of these findings to a wider variety of service contexts. This research is the first to demonstrate how firms can leverage employee behavior as a brand-building advantage, particularly for new or unfamiliar brands as they establish their positioning with customers.

Qualitative field research based on long depth interviews with business-to-business customers who defected from a supplier relationship is used to develop an integrated theoretical framework explaining how the defection decision process unfolds over time in business-to-business relationships. The authors develop a taxonomy of events, both internal and external to the relationship, that are proposed to create “defection energy,” or the motivation to move a customer from relationship status quo toward a defection decision. The framework illustrates how these internal and external events interact with the organization’s and the individual decision maker’s goals, practices, and values to engage a dynamic anchoring and updating mechanism based on accumulated defection energy that drives the process toward a decision threshold. The research offers marketers insights to improve defection management, including an understanding of how organizational and individual customer needs shape relationships; that defection decisions build as a result of multiple events over time, requiring a longer-term perspective on defection; and that defection decisions can be influenced by events outside the core product or service delivery process, suggesting that these decisions need to be understood within the broader context of the overall relationship.

Technology is profoundly changing the nature of services and the ways in which firms interact with their customers. The result, while positive, also has its downside. This paper elaborates on the opportunities that technology presents for firms to develop new services, and provide better, more efficient services to customers as well as the paradoxes and dark side of technology and services. The paper concludes with a section on what customers expect from technology-delivered services suggesting that \"the more things change, the more some things remain the same\". Customers still demand quality service no matter how the firm chooses to structure the relationship. It is incumbent upon firms to develop technology-based services that can provide the same high level of service that customers expect from interpersonal service providers.

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 metaphor as the framework, the authors trace the literature through three stages: Crawling Out (1953–79); Scurrying About (1980–85); and Walking Erect (1986-present). The discussion of the three stages shows how the literature has evolved from the early services-marketing-is-different debate to the maturation of specific topics (e.g., service quality, service encounters) and the legitimization of the services marketing literature by major marketing journals. A classification and summary of the publishing outlets where the literature has appeared is presented. The article closes with discussion and speculation on the future of the services marketing literature.

Companies are allocating increasing coproduction workloads to consumers. Ironically, many consumers may be ill-equipped to coproduce, as indicated by widespread low service literacy (e.g., financial literacy, medical literacy). This research examines how consumers, particularly those low in service literacy, respond to varying levels of firm-assigned coproduction workload. Five studies, including a hospital field experiment, reveal three findings. First, service literacy plays a moderating role, such that higher (vs. lower) levels of coproduction workload improve service outcomes (e.g., compliance intentions), particularly for consumers with low service literacy. Second, coproduction eustress is a crucial mediator, such that positive service outcomes result from consumers appraising coproduction tasks as positive and meaningful challenges. In turn, eustress is elicited by consumers' belief that they are collaborating with the provider to achieve a shared goal. Third, offering organizational support to consumers might mitigate the beneficial effects of coproduction eustress because it can trigger reactance. This research can help policy makers and managers in finding new ways to activate consumers, particularly those low in service literacy as coproducers for better service outcomes.