به سوی درک عمیق تر از بازاریابی خدمات : گذشته، حال و آینده
کد مقاله | سال انتشار | تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی |
---|---|---|
2832 | 2011 | 17 صفحه PDF |
Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)
Journal : International Journal of Research in Marketing, Volume 28, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 231–247
چکیده انگلیسی
The authors investigate the intellectual pillars of service marketing and its evolution through key subareas during 1992–2009 using a citation-based approach. They derive insights for the most promising research directions. The results reveal the dynamic influences of different research topics on service marketing. In a graphical representation, the authors further show that the main topics have changed their research orientations over time. For example, the literature on online service & technology infusion reveals an increasingly operational and customer-focused orientation. A citation-based measure of the significance of research opportunities and a comparison with the topics found in recent literature reviews indicate that research on managing business-to-business services & service infusion, complaint handling & service recovery, and enhancing and managing the service value chain are promising topics. These results assist academics and practitioners by revealing what we know about service research and what we need to know in the future.
مقدمه انگلیسی
The increasing importance of services for the growth and prosperity of most of the world's economies appears prominently in the course of daily business. By providing services, firms can raise revenues and market share, even in turbulent, competitive environments (Fang, Palmatier, & Steenkamp, 2008). Therefore, manufacturing companies increasingly seek to attain a sustainable competitive advantage through service offerings (Reinartz & Ulaga, 2008). As the relevance of services continues to grow, research in service marketing becomes increasingly critical (Ostrom et al., 2010). Service marketing emerged as a distinct subfield of the marketing discipline in the late 1970s (Brown et al., 1994 and Shostack, 1977). However, its importance for the entire marketing field has become apparent in the ongoing discussion about service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). This discussion places the service discipline on the marketing agenda and reveals the intellectual bonds between service academics and the marketing field. This ongoing discussion of a new logic for marketing makes it ever more important to gain deeper insights into the structure of the service research field, especially for academics who are not experienced with the insights that service marketing provides and the benefits from its key topics for the field of marketing. Thus, we assert that a comprehensive analysis of the current state of service literature is worthwhile for both academia and practitioners who need to understand the intellectual pillars of service marketing and the progression of the field. Some researchers have offered comprehensive literature reviews of the service discipline (e.g., Brown et al., 1994, Fisk et al., 1993, Grove et al., 2003 and Rust and Chung, 2006). These studies have mainly determined the state of service marketing according to ratings by experts or the authors themselves (e.g., Fisk et al., 1993 and Grove et al., 2003). Whereas some quantitative studies note the identity of service marketing journals (Svensson, Slåtten, & Tronvoll, 2008) or topics researched in specific journals (Furrer and Sollberger, 2007 and Pilkington and Chai, 2008), little research has delved into the intellectual basis and evolution of service research or determined research agendas using quantitative measures such as citation databases. Citation data can offer objective insights and unveil research topics currently undetected by expert evaluations; its use has been recommended as a complement to literature reviews (Tellis, Chandy, & Ackerman, 1999). We provide a quantitative view of the current state of the discipline and a glimpse into the future, based on citation data. Furthermore, we compare our findings to the topics recommended in recent articles and academic conferences to show where our findings are similar and where our data reveal distinct results. Our quantitative approach relies on citation data from top-tier service and marketing journals over the timeframe 1992–2009. The use of citations is worthwhile because citations provide “frozen footprints in the landscape of scholarly achievement; footprints which bear witness to the passage of ideas” (Cronin, 1981, p. 16) that indicate knowledge exchanges among scholars. Citations also reflect developments in a field over time and offer insights into emerging research topics by exhibiting trends in citation patterns (Judge, Cable, Colbert, & Rynes, 2007). We consider several research questions in this realm: What are the most influential works and topics in service marketing? How has the service field evolved over time? What will be the next important topics in service marketing? This article provides several key contributions from service marketing, methodological, and practitioner perspectives. Researchers and practitioners may gain an overview of existing concepts and insights from service marketing, which may be helpful in light of the explosion of publication outlets that makes it increasingly difficult to keep track of important new insights. Moreover, practitioners can glean key insights regarding important areas for their daily business. To summarize our overview, we provide a graphical representation of the evolution of service marketing that illustrates the intellectual exchange of ideas. This compressed view of the field can help scholars and practitioners who are new to this area to grasp its evolution more easily. From a methodological perspective, we adopt a longitudinal orientation based on Poisson log-multiplicative models (Pieters, Baumgartner, Vermunt, & Bijmolt, 1999), which enables us to consider the time heterogeneity of the influence of articles and their interrelationships simultaneously. Unlike previous studies that have discussed different periods independently, we link the time periods through a procrustes analysis to draw a dynamic picture of the field and derive research trends. In addition, we employ a measure of upcoming articles and promising research fields that uses citation data to predict potentially influential work. This new measure offers deeper insights into the question of what will be next in the research field.
نتیجه گیری انگلیسی
This study demonstrates the great potential of citation and cocitation analyses for academia, but it also has some limitations. A cocitation analysis cannot identify the motives for citing a specific article (Baumgartner and Pieters, 2003 and Stremersch et al., 2007), nor can it detect whether a citation offers supportive arguments or serves as a subject of critique (Hofacker, Gleim, & Lawson, 2009). Holistic analysis methods that combine citation analysis and text mining approaches could minimize this potential bias and create a more precise depiction of the scientific discipline. Moreover, we measure article influence on the basis of its appearance in reference lists, consistent with previous bibliometric studies (Baumgartner & Pieters, 2003). However, we cannot identify the frequency of citations within an article (Seggie & Griffith, 2009). Additional bibliometric research should include both the reference lists and the full texts of articles as data sets to identify the number of citations. Moreover, considering citations within the text might help evaluate the strength of cocitation patterns. Citation analyses depend on published articles to detect research trends, but not all manuscripts are published immediately (e.g., working papers, manuscripts from conferences without proceedings), which means they are insufficiently considered in citation studies, even if they have had an impact. Considering the increasing, instant, worldwide access to manuscripts, even before they are published, it might be interesting to determine how working papers from well-known research centers or prepublished manuscripts stimulate additional research. In our analysis, we did not control for the quality of the publication outlet, though the quality of the outlet (top tier vs. non-top tier) or the specificity of the journal (service vs. marketing) might influence citation behavior. On the one hand, articles in top-tier journals could be cited more often because these journals offer a broader readership. Articles that appear in these outlets thus might indicate a higher impact because they were published in a highly ranked journal. On the other hand, the rigorous review process mandated by top-tier journals might mean that any article published in them will be higher quality, such that it should generate a higher impact. Recent meta-analyses stress the importance of controlling for heterogeneity caused by outlet-specific effects (Gelbrich & Roschk, 2011), though this procedure is not yet common in practice. We did not detect any such outlet bias in our results, but additional citation studies might control for this possible bias. Finally, similar to other quantitative approaches that use citations and linear trend estimation, we cannot forecast the structural breaks in the evolution of the research field. Such a change might be induced by new research concepts that have been discussed in the scientific community but have not been sufficiently reflected in published articles. A similar problem exists when only a limited number of observational periods exist for an article. In this case, first-trend forecasting might be over-estimated (i.e., one-period hype) or underestimated (i.e., article needs more time to diffuse). Therefore, we again emphasize that citation-based approaches are not in competition with literature reviews or expert-based approaches; rather, these approaches complement one another. Overall, this study quantitatively confirms some research opportunities and unveils topics that have not appeared prominently on the service research agenda but that demand further emphasis. We hope that this work inspires service researchers to continue to expand the boundaries of our knowledge about service marketing.