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Describes how companies can make managing the emotional expectations of customers the frontier of the customer‐focused enterprise.

Customer experiences have emotional characteristics that companies historically haven't been good at delivering. The customer experience is more than an analysis of hard metrics about speed, availability and information. These performance measures are critical, but real progress in shaping the customer experience comes from addressing the emotional aspects of their interactions.

The key to success is to fully understand the customers' needs and expectations. By doing so, companies can identify what the most important interactions are – key “moments of truth” – and prioritize delivery on these interactions.

By employing a customer experience framework to prioritize resources according to the impact of particular customer interactions, paying particular attention to emotional experiences, companies can build achievable operational models that create customer advocates.

Best‐in‐class companies understand the entire customer experience and use a Customer‐Focused Enterprise model to foster customer advocates while deploying resources effectively and efficiently. The six characteristics of the CFE are: customer authority, customer dialog, integrated execution, solution experience, human performance and customer focused organization.

During the latter-half of the twentieth century, researchers argued that the notion of universities being communities of scholars that were governed by scholars had been replaced by a mass-market higher education system. The new system is shaped by competition for students, a need to be budget conscious and, ultimately, a requirement for university leaders to be able to approach their work with a certain level of business acumen. This chapter examines what these pressures mean for those working at the middle level of university leadership, when they are increasingly appointed on managerial expertise but make decisions about academics and their work. Using Bourdieu's notions of fields to dissect these relationships, the chapter uses semi-structured interviews with faculty deans to examine how their work is guided by managerialist targets but impacts on their relationships with academics. The chapter highlights that, while the sector has acknowledged that successful leaders do not always need research profiles in the modern university, this often has a negative impact on leaders' relationships with academics.

By studying marketing strategies of the global Weider Nutrition International Group, this study aims to analyse how the industry surrounding fitness equipment and dietary supplements interacted with fitness culture through marketing, advertising and consumption in 1950s Scandinavia. The emphasis is on how the Weider Group established their position as a world leader in sports nutrition through mail order partnerships and advertising using bodies and body ideals in their campaigns.

The Weider Group’s marketing campaigns are studied through close reading of text and images in Scandinavian weightlifting and bodybuilding magazines in the 1950s, guided by a theoretical understanding of the body as a constant and ongoing project.

This study deepens the historical knowledge of market-driven aspects of sport and exercise. The market for nutrition and fitness products was internationalised in the 1950s. The study shows that cooperation between commercial and civic organisations played a major role in the enterprise of selling fitness and nutrition products.

This paper shows that in marketing the products, the advertisements – which appealed to both men and women – not only struck a tone of intimacy and desire but also cultivated a sense of insecurity and inadequacy, as well as individuals’ responsibility for maintaining their own bodies. The latter was reflected in young men’s letters to magazines in which Weider’s products and training programmes were praised. For women, this opened up a previously male-dominated gym environment.

Recognizing the need to build global-minded citizens, higher education institutions are increasingly trying to find ways to leverage their international programs to develop students’ intercultural competence. The MA in global leadership at Royal Roads University, Canada, created an international partnership in Ecuador that serves to go beyond the traditional student study abroad or service learning focus and instead focuses on developing competencies of global mindedness and strategic relationships. In this chapter, we present an analysis of how an international student group engaged in building dynamic partnerships within a Global South country to create change for sustainable development initiatives of mutual concern. Through a case example, we describe how these partnerships evolved and adapted in ways that enhanced the learning needs of the students while simultaneously supporting the development of new educational opportunities for Ecuadorians. To illustrate, this chapter delineates the activities that members of the program undertook to connect and develop a mutuality of relationship across diverse stakeholders in Ecuador. The authors analyze this network-building process from the perspective of cultural context, building trust and influence, and responding to social development needs of host communities.

Looks at how the Labour Party in the UK re‐organized and regenerated itself between 1983 and 1992 and suggests that, as a result, the party has an over‐reliance on corporate marketing and management, to the detriment of party democracy. Also believes that overcentralization of decision making took place, particularly with regard to the reporting of market research data, a central function at the heart of modern electioneering. Discusses some of the problems which this caused and the changes which have taken place since the departure of Neil Kinnock in 1992.

For centuries, death has proved itself a well-spring of inspiration for artists and musicians. In particular, an artist's own experiences with death and bereavement often overflow into their creative process, giving birth to artworks which channel grief and embodied experience. Morning Heroes by the British composer Sir Arthur Bliss (1891–1975) is a paradigm of such praxis.

Morning Heroes (1930) was written in memory of Bliss's brother, Kennard, who was killed in action during the First World War. Using an anthology of texts, the work aims to enshrine a universal experience of war for both soldier and civilian and maintains its connection with the British War Requiem through its use of musico-funerary rhetoric. Bliss, who converted to Catholicism during the war, wrote several times in his later life about the spiritual nature of music, specifically its ability to heal and bring peace. It is significant, therefore, that Morning Heroes was to act as a catharsis for Bliss, sublimating his recurring nightmares of the war.

Adopting Douglas Davies' (2017) ‘words against death’ idea, this chapter considers Sir Arthur Bliss's Morning Heroes as ‘music against death’ through an examination of Bliss's use of text and music to craft a requiem in sound. It explores Bliss's use of death rhetoric and embodied experience to create a vehicle for grief and situates this process within the context of his own spiritual philosophies.

Measuring service quality in higher education is increasingly important for attracting and retaining tuition‐based revenues. Nonetheless, whilst undergraduates have received substantial academic exposure, postgraduate‐based research has been scant. Consequently, the objectives of this paper are threefold: first, to identify the service factors used by postgraduates in their quality evaluations. Second, to analyse the appropriateness of importance‐performance analysis (IPA) in the measurement of service quality and, final, to provide a working example of IPA's application in a UK‐based university.

Convergent interviews were used to elicit attributes of service that were deemed important by taught postgraduate students. These findings were then tested using an online survey. Exploratory factor analysis was used to group the service attributes into latent “service factors”. Each service factor was then tested for service quality using Martilla and James's IPA technique.

About 20 service attributes were educed from the qualitative stage. From these, four service factors emerged; being, academic, leisure, industry links and cost. Using IPA in a UK university, the findings suggest that the “academic” and “industry links” aspects of service quality are the most critical to postgraduates. The paper's conclusions suggest that IPA is an appropriate tool for measuring service quality in postgraduate education.

Through the application of the IPA framework presented in this research, practitioners can successfully identify areas of service priority and thus allocate appropriate resources to encourage continuous service improvement.

This research provides a valuable insight into the service quality needs of the UK postgraduate segment and also a potential conceptual framework for policy makers to use when evaluating their service delivery.

This paper aims to describe the development of a new software tool for the scheduling of real‐time control messages in a time‐triggered control network. The prime application area for such a solution is in real‐time robotic controllers and other similar machine control systems.

The design of a scheduling tool, called SMART‐Plan, is described. The tool is based on a “least slack time” scheduling policy. A prototype tool for the time‐triggered controller area network (TTCAN) is developed. The design is validated against Society of Automotive Engineers Benchmark and a formal verification of the message schedule is also proposed.

The research findings show that it is feasible to develop such a message scheduling tool and the performance of the tool is comparable with other research solutions, which have been applied in the past to simple periodic schedulers, as opposed to time‐triggered networks.

Although the prototype solution assumes a TTCAN control network, the concept will also be feasible for other types of time‐triggered control networks. The availability of such a tool might encourage developers of robotic equipment to adopt the time‐triggered network approach for the architectural development of such control systems. To date, the problems associated with the message scheduling of such time‐triggered systems have been an inhibitor to such developments.

This is a new scheduling approach to the message scheduling of time‐triggerred control networks.