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Firstly, we would like to inform you of the recent announcement by Thomson Reuters that the Journal of Services Marketing’s impact factor increased in 2015 to 1.021 from 0.989. 

Secondly, here are highlights from Volume 30 Issue 3.  These articles have been hand-picked by the newsletter co-ordinator Dr Chris Hodkinson from the University of Queensland and are available until the 15 July 2016.  This issue features a number of papers that focus on emotions and services marketing as well as an editorial on getting cited.

Get Noticed!

Getting published is great but getting cited is better! While the publication of one’s own work gives one a warm feeling, often nobody notices! Is this surprising with so many active journals, even with many of them being of good quality?  All products need promotion! We marketers know that even if we build a better mousetrap that the world will not (necessarily) beat a path to our door. It is ironic that many excellent marketing academics do not promote the citation of their own work in other words they do not have a marketing plan for their work or more importantly themselves as a personal brand. 

Gratitude has real effects

Gratitude is a well-acknowledged concept which has an effect on personal happiness.  However while leading journals have published articles on gratitude there has been little consensus on a definition or the nature of the concept in relation to customer service experiences.  It has been variously defined as having affective, cognitive, and reciprocal elements. It has also been considered as a ‘sentiment’ rather than an emotion.  In an intriguing article Bock, Folse, and Black report their four-stage grounded theory research in which they adopt a tri-dimensional conceptualisation of gratitude and develop and validate a parsimonious scale. Their scale allows gratitude to be measured and firmly positions it as having an equivalent effect to satisfaction and value judgements and emphasises the role of reciprocity.  As a result their work has significant research and service management implications. Read it and be grateful.

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The two paths to delight

Delight is a profoundly positive emotional state generally resulting from expectations having been exceeded to a surprising degree.  In addition, delight has been shown to have a more reliable effect on customer loyalty than satisfaction. This being said, what are the key causes of delight, and, most importantly, is surprise a necessary antecedent of customer delight? Barnes, Collier, Howe, and Hoffman set out to clarify delight’s underlying mechanisms and they determined that both surprise and joy have relatively the same impact on delight.  Most surprisingly they found that more frequent customers experience a stronger joy-to-delight influence. The practical implication of this is that it may not be necessary to repeatedly surprise repeat customers for them to experience service delight as employee expertise can significantly influence joyful customer perceptions.  Their ‘two paths to delight’ finding is important because delight critics saw the ability to invoke surprise in repeat customers as being problematic. In addition Barnes et al. found that customer delight impacts the percentage of budget spent, thus proving it can have a significant effect on consumer spending – how delightful!  

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Staying emotional authentic when customers behave badly

We know the importance of customer-orientation for service performance and we know the effect of emotional labour but how do these two concepts work together in a context of dysfunctional customer behaviour?  In an experimental design, Huang and Brown use airline check-ins, service workers are presented with two scenarios of dysfunctional customer behaviour (mild and severe). The results show that customer orientation influences emotional sensitivity and perspective-taking and these both influence deep acting.  When you add dysfunctional customer behaviour into the mix, the positive effect of emotional sensitivity on deep acting is weakened. So in the event of severe customer dysfunction, a service worker’s emotional sensitivity is less likely to drive the deep acting and it may be difficult for the service worker to remain emotionally authentic.

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