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How can popular misconceptions about the nature of customer relationship marketing/management limit the effectiveness of this approach? How are companies misled by an over‐reliance on technology, lack of strategic perspective, use of faulty metrics, inadequate segmentation, neglect of brand considerations, blind faith in data, and confusion regarding leadership roles? This article challenges the misconceptions and provides guidance on how to successfully execute a customer relationship strategy.

This study defines service breakdowns, service breakdown prevention, and “servicide” as they relate to service-dominant logic. The study reviews relevant relevant literature on these three topics. This study categorizes real-life examples into five levels of dramatic turns toward service degradations and breakdowns that range from customer being aware but not mentioning service inadequacy to the service breakdown resulting in death of the customer or service provider. Taking initial steps in developing dramatic turn theory and improving the practice of service breakdown prevention are the major contributions of this study.

This study is a conceptual contribution that includes a dramatic turn role-playing exercise (at category 4 among five categories of dramatic turns for pedagogical/on-site enacting/practicing and training of service professionals. The study emphasizes and shows how to create and enact role-playing scenarios to increase requisite variety, provide training modules and increase skills/expertise in service enactment contexts.

Before explicit reviewing of the dramatic-turn performances, some of the participants as actors as well as audience members in role-play dramatic turns were quick to blame the customer behavior as the principal cause for the service breakdown. The study’s exposition stresses prevention of negative dramatic turns follows from experiencing and coaching a wide variety of customer and server interactions – achieving “richness” in enactments.

Research on service breakdown prevention needs to include field experiments on the efficacy of training programs for effective management of dramatic turns.

Training of service workers and service managers in experiencing/participating in dramatic turns is likely to be beneficial in reducing the severe adverse outcomes and unintended consequences of service breakdowns. Prevention, not only service failure recovery, needs to be an explicit focus in hospitality management training and assessment.

This study suggests tools and procedures to reduce the instances of the need for service breakdown recoveries.

The study calls attention and contributes a way forward in managing dramatic turns in hospitality service contexts. The study provides a nascent configurational theoretical foundation of dramatic-turn propositions. Given the severity of financial costs and loss of brand/firm reputation following the occurrence of extreme dramatic turns, a research focus on service breakdown prevention is necessary.

Asserts that the essential role of Customer Satisfaction Measurement (CSM) is not simply a research activity, but a key management tool. Suggests the Quality Integration Framework as one attempt to blend the components of external, perceived quality (upper pyramid) with a hierarchy of organisational elements pertaining to the company′s internal quality (lower pyramid). Proposes that total quality can exist only when the two pyramids are closely aligned. Considers the external and internal quality and discusses some implications of the Framework. Concludes that CSM is a strategic tool which progressive companies will treat as an integral element of the firm′s total quality management.

Customer satisfaction measurement (CSM) should be central to the total quality improvement process within service‐oriented firms. A normative framework is described that contains a sequence of ten research modules providing internal/external customer information for quality planning. The modules facilitate decision making according to the PDCA cycle of total quality management. The framework is based on the CSM/quality improvement practices of leading European and North American firms, methodologies developed in academic settings, and the general logic of survey research.

Offers the personal interpretations of authors as participant‐observers together with a data‐based analysis of the evolution of the services marketing literature. Bibliographic analysis of more than 1,000 English language, general services marketing publications, spanning four decades, provides an additional resource. Using an evolutionary metaphor as the framework, traces the literature through three stages: Crawling Out (1953‐79): Scurrying About (1980‐85); and Walking Erect (1986‐present). 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 journals. Presents a classification and summary of publications and authors. Closes with discussion and speculation on the future of the services marketing literature.

Addresses the issue of cultural diversity in the workplace. Covers the subjects of gender, multiculturalism and age‐related issues, providing a number of statistics for examples. Looks at the impact of technology in areas such as intranets, e‐mail and Web marketing, customer relationship management, virtual offices, automation and virtual teams. Examines the implications of these relationships for corporate America today and in the future.

Transaction cost economics is an important anchor for analyzing a wide range of economic and organizational issues and is complemented by various theories, resulting in a perception shift of transaction governance structure from a polar classification toward a continuum (John & Reve, 1982; Heide & Miner, 1992; Hennart, 1993). Despite conceptual framework developments, empirical studies based on the continuum are scarce. This research is an initial effort toward TGS dimensionalization and operationalization and reviews theoretical developments since 1930, surveys empirical studies from 1982 to 2004, presents Williamson’s framework (1991), and proposes a set of items for instrument design.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the existence and strength of the relationship between proactive environmental policies and brand equity for the winery. Results of this study suggest that consumer perceptions about product quality, consumer trust, consumer perceptions about pricing, and positive expectations for the consequences of the winery's actions undertaking the pro‐environmental policies, all have strong, positive relationships with the winery's brand equity. Trust in the winery and brand equity for the winery increased significantly when the winery in this study adopted proactive environmental business policies.

Somewhere along the line marketers got off track, especially at the academic level. At its core, the discipline is one of persuasion and influence. Yet the concept of power is conspicuously absent from most works on the nature of the marketing effort. That's a hit like trying to teach skydiving by ignoring gravity. Sometimes the results are also similar, in dealing with policy and strategy. The author provides a brief history of the demise of the power concept in marketing and offers a contextual argument for its inclusion as a central tenet of the discipline's conceptual core.