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The purpose of this study is to explore consumer anticipation processes that occur after commitment to a purchase has been made, but before consumption occurs. The authors add to the knowledge and theory building about anticipation that occurs in this liminal phase by investigating the cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes that interact to influence post-consumption evaluations.

An abductive research approach used a phase-based research design using semi-structured interviews. The authors identify interactions between cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes that occur during anticipation and associate these with post-consumption outcomes.

Anticipation of a consumption experience, enacted through thoughts, emotions and actions, and undertaken with peers, is an experience per se, independent from and interdependent with the substantive experience, and contributes to performance of the substantive experience. The authors propose a framework in which anticipation – as a performative phenomenon – influences the overall evaluations of the substantive consumption experience in contexts of delayed consumption. The theoretical grounding of performativity makes a useful contribution through its linkage of thought processes to outcomes. The authors further locate their findings within the literature on attribution theory. By engaging in anticipation, informants perceived the locus of causality to be internal, and expressed pride in having anticipated if the subsequent experience was successful. By anticipating, informants perceived an ability to exert control over future events and felt ashamed of not having adequately anticipated if an experience was subsequently unsuccessful.

The theoretical grounding of performativity makes a useful contribution through its linkage of thought processes to outcomes. The authors further locate their findings within the literature on attribution theory. By engaging in anticipation, informants perceived the locus of causality to be internal and expressed pride in having anticipated if the subsequent experience was successful. By anticipating, informants perceived an ability to exert control over future events and felt ashamed of not having adequately anticipated if an experience was subsequently unsuccessful.

The authors discuss the trade-off service providers face between encouraging anticipation, which raises expectations that might not be met, and facilitating anticipatory preparations, which may reduce the risk of service failure.

The authors provide a new lens by conceptualising anticipation as a performative process and identifying mechanisms by which anticipation is embedded in total consumption experience. This study has important generalisable implications for contexts where mechanisms of performative anticipation may be a means for ameliorating uncertainty about future consumption experiences.

This paper aims to reflect on the paper “Service failure and loyalty: an exploratory empirical study of airline customers” published 18 years ago. It positions it in the evolving literature on relationship marketing and suggests directions for further research and developments in the area.

A review of key contributions of the paper to the study of relationship marketing and the effects of service failures on relationships identifies emerging strands of research.

The concept of a “relationship lifecycle” is now widely used in marketing for identifying customer segments. Different points in the lifecycle are associated with differing sets of relationship expectations and levels of tolerance to service failure. Customer relationship management has tended to morph into customer experience management where principles of relationship lifecycles have been applied to mapping customer “journeys” through a service process.

The original study informed practices of managing relationship expectations and handling failed expectations, depending on a customer’s length of relationship with a company. Although relationship marketing was originally conceived as an integrator of marketing cues, its emphasis on cognitive evaluations may have been too limiting and customer experience management has since introduced additional affective dimensions.

The original paper had been widely cited and generated discussion and important further research. It has value as part of the emerging landscape of services marketing research. This retrospective analysis locates this historical development with reference to currently popular issues of customer experience management.

This paper addresses the issue of service quality evaluation within the higher education sector and stresses the need to develop measures that are both psychometrically and practically sound. The paper argues that recent debate surrounding the development of such measures has been too strongly geared toward their psychometric performance, with little regard for their practical value. While the paper supports the need to develop valid, reliable and replicable measures of service quality, it is suggested that educators must not lose sight of the original purpose for which these measures were designed, i.e. their practical value in informing continuous quality improvement efforts. It critiques the use of disconfirmation models and reports on a study of students’ perceptions of quality using importance‐performance analysis (IPA). The technique allows specific failings in the quality of support issues to be identified and their importance to a quality improvement programme assessed.

Reports on a program of research to learn more about the effects of survey timing on customers’ perceptions of service quality. Argues that an individual’s perceptions of service quality may not be stable over time and that suppliers should be particularly interested in consumers’ perceptions at the time that the next re‐purchase decision is made, rather than the period immediately following consumption. Reports empirical evidence on a number of studies from the hospitality, tourism and higher education sectors in Western Australia. States that results to date cast doubt on the wisdom of the traditional exit survey approach to service quality assessment. Warns that the information derived from the traditional exit survey may not necessarily bear any relation to the chances of converting one time customers into lifetime customers. It follows that the major pre‐occupation of many organisations with measuring perceptions during or immediately following service consumption may have little relevance to service quality perceptions which are important in subsequently forming future re‐purchase intentions.

Relationship marketing has received a lot of attention recently as a “Big new idea”. Unfortunately, the term currently means different things to different people. At one extreme, it is seen tactically as little more than the creation and manipulation of databases, something that is almost synonymous with Direct Marketing. At the other extreme, relationship marketing is viewed as a philosophy that goes to the heart of business by putting customers — and their changing needs — as the focus of everything an organisation does. Instead of organising around brands, companies organise around the need to sustain the confidence of their customers and gain an increasing share of their wallet. In the research to be discussed here, relationship marketing is interpreted as business strategy which is aimed at turning casual, discrete transactions between buyers and sellers into an ongoing relationship through tactical devices such as database marketing and loyalty programmes.

Direct marketing faces challenges and opportunities associated with the emergence of social network media. Companies need to address target audiences both directly and also indirectly through social media. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the changing media landscape of direct marketing, and proposes a model of direct and indirect targeting of buyers.

A conceptual model is presented which brings together the needs of producers, sellers and communities. Customer experience is used as an integrative framework for reconciling the sometimes differing needs of these groups.

The literature is reviewed, noting changes in media habits. Previous studies of social network users provide a picture of the benefits sought by members of online communities.

Assessment of direct marketing has traditionally emphasised cognitive and behavioural metrics. This paper has proposed an experiential framework which may be more difficult to measure, but evidence is presented that emotions associated with use of social network web sites may be more important as a key success factor for direct marketing.

Heightened competition in the e‐commerce domain continues to force the need for a reliable and user‐friendly service quality measurement methodology. The challenge facing practitioners, however, is to identify and implement the most appropriate measurement tools for their operation. Disconfirmation measures have come to dominate the debate concerning this very issue, with both direct and inferred techniques presenting themselves as reliable and valid measures of online quality. This paper addresses this very debate in the context of an online library service setting. It presents findings that attest to the psychometric and diagnostic performance of both techniques and suggests that while much time is taken up discussing the former, the real power of such techniques for online operators rests with the latter, i.e. their ability to pinpoint service failures and direct continuous quality improvement efforts.

The SERVQUAL methodology has been challenged on a number of grounds, including the failure of many researchers to replicate the original SERVQUAL factor structure, and the unrealistic notion that consumers can form expectations about a service when they have little prior knowledge about the product. This paper explores the role of experience on the dimensions of service quality. An exploratory survey is reported in which a sample of visitors to a theme park was divided into two groups according to their level of experience of theme parks. A factor analysis of the data indicated a more complex factor structure for the group with prior experience of theme parks.

The business environment of the 1990s has seen a shift in firms’ emphasis away from recruiting new customers, towards nurturing and retaining those that they currently have. Numerous studies have demonstrated the effects on profitability of pursuing what has become known generically as “relationship marketing”. Discussion of relationship marketing has suffered from a failure to position the concept, resulting in interpretations ranging from short‐term sales incentives to a core business philosophy. Explores these multiple dimensions of relationship marketing, and challenges the emerging conventional wisdom that relational exchange between buyers and sellers should be the norm which all businesses aim for. Although relationship marketing may be very attractive for many products and markets, its adoption may be inappropriate in others. Parties to an exchange may have diverging views on commitment to each other and may not welcome the possibility of having their chances for opportunism restricted. In some sensitive markets, the cost of loyalty schemes may exceed the revenue benefits of repeated levels of business at profitable prices. Finally, the overenthusiastic development of buyer‐seller relationships can have anti‐ competitive implications, which are evident in some Eastern countries.

The purpose of this paper is to record the author’s personal reflections on his career as a marketing scholar.

Personal reflections in an autobiographical approach.

The author’s career as student, teacher and scholar is described in some detail.

The paper records events and memories that might otherwise be forgotten. No other such account has been published of Christian Grönroos’s career.