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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of Internal Market Orientation (IMO) on the application of internal marketing practices and employee job satisfaction.

Data were secured through personal interviews with hotel managers and employees from 20 different five‐star hotels. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to examine the hypotheses put forward in the study.

Job satisfaction is positively related with the practice of internal marketing. However, IMO is also a significant variable in explaining employee job‐satisfaction while moderating the relationship between internal marketing and job satisfaction.

Drawing the analogy from the market‐orientation research stream, this study reveals the importance of developing an internal‐market orientation before internal marketing practices can be truly effective.

Service providers seeking differentiation through customer service and delight have to pay attention to their employees' needs and develop an internal‐market orientation to complement their customer‐orientation.

The paper is important for both scholars and practitioners. It introduces the notion of IMO and its impact on employee job‐satisfaction.

While significant empirical work exists around the conceptualization of the notion of market orientation (MO), as well as its relation to company performance, little empirical work has attempted to depict the actual steps a company has to take in order to increase its adaptability to market situation and, thus become market oriented. Furthermore, no empirical work has attempted so far to investigate the degree of MO between companies producing consumer goods vs companies producing industrial goods. By examining a number of research propositions, this paper attempts to investigate the marketing practices of consumer goods producers vis‐à‐vis the practices of companies that participate in industrial markets and to discriminate industrial from consumer goods companies based on their marketing practices and MO adoption profile.

The paper aims to offer a preliminary insight into the issue of whether service providers eliminate their offerings in various stages of their life cycle, and if so, whether elimination decision‐making differs depending on the service's life cycle stage.

Data were secured by means of a structured questionnaire which was completed through personal interviews. Respondents answered all questions having a recently eliminated service in mind. The initial calls and follow‐up efforts generated 164 usable responses (49.8 per cent response rate).

A service may be eliminated from a service provider's portfolio in any stage of its life cycle. Further, in terms of precipitating circumstances, evaluation factors and elimination strategies, the service elimination process differs depending on the stage of the service life cycle that the elimination decision is taken.

The most important implication is service providers eliminate services not only as a response to a crisis possibly caused by drops of sales volume, but also for other reasons. In this respect, service portfolio rationalization and particularly service elimination may result as a consequence of strategic management decisions taken for positive (e.g. development of a new service) or negative (e.g. competitive actions) reasons. Within this framework, the service life cycle (SLC) model, as a strategic tool for analysis and decision‐making, may well serve to guide the rationalization process.

The research questions of the study have been examined for tangible products, but this is the first relevant study that is conducted in a service context.

The reason for this study is to help increase understanding concerning the service elimination decision and implementation since it remains a highly under‐investigated topic. In doing so, an empirical investigation of the successful vs not‐so‐successful elimination practices from eight service industries were examined.

The data were secured by means of a lengthy and structured questionnaire, instrumented through personal interviews as part of a much wider examination of the service elimination decision‐making process in Greece entitled “Project ServDrop”. The companies included in the sample were drawn from a population of 1,964 service companies listed under selected service sectors, namely, insurance, banking, advertising, professional services, freight forwarding, marine, telecommunications and lodging.

The analysis reveals that treating the elimination as a strategic issue, considering how resources can be more effectively re‐allocated, paying attention to market consideration regarding the consequences of a potential elimination and adoption of a systematic behavior, building interdisciplinary teams to deal with the decision and keeping the time between the making and the implementation of the decision short, are all important dimensions of “successful elimination”.

However, the findings should be cautiously adopted because of the limitations of the study: the use of a retrospective methodology in the data collection, the use of the key‐informant approach, the limited number of variables included in the conceptual framework are issues that cannot be neglected. Nonetheless future research that will be directed towards tackling these limitations may dispel these concerns.

Despite its limitations, this study has significant implications for practitioners. It mainly points to the strategic nature of the elimination decision and its implications. Also, it unveils certain behavioral changes that must accompany the effort to treat the elimination decision as part of the greater strategy for managing the firm's offerings. Thus, the contribution of this study is twofold. For academia, it is a step forward towards a stronger understanding of the service elimination issues, while, for practitioners, it helps to clarify certain important issues that can help improve the outcome of the decision to drop a service from the firm's portfolio.

While significant empirical work exists around the conceptualization of the notion of market orientation, as well as its relation to company performance, little empirical work has attempted to sketch how a firm's behavior alters when the principles of market orientation are adopted. In this study, the authors investigate empirically the notion of market orientation continuum, according to which companies can be classified depending on the degree of adoption. Next, the behavioral implication of the company's position on the continuum is investigated. Moreover, the role of the company's market environment in explaining the degree of market orientation adoption and its classification along this continuum is also assessed. Finally, the behavioral consequences of this classification are considered.

Using empirical data derived from the Greek banking sector, the authors attempt to model the influence of bank‐specific (market orientation) and customer‐specific (comparison shopping, influence by word‐of‐mouth‐communication and personal relations with banks’ employees) parameters on the customer’s perception of service quality. The latter is conceptualised and examined as a multidimensional concept comprising employee competence, the bank’s reliability, the innovativeness of the bank’s products, its pricing (value for money), the bank’s physical evidence and the convenience of the bank’s branch network. As the findings suggest, the various dimensions of the quality of service offered by a bank are not influenced by all the antecedents examined in this study. Moreover, the gravity of the influence that each of the examined parameters exercises on the customer’s perception of the various dimensions of quality was also found to vary considerably, with certain dimensions being more influenced by the same parameter than others. Based on these findings, the authors suggest specific implications for both the academia and practitioners in the banking industry.

Building on previous studies which suggested that trust is a critical factor in facilitating exchange relationships, the authors investigate with empirically derived data the role of service quality and customer bonding as antecedents of trust in relatively newer vis‐à‐vis a relatively mature relationship between the provider of business‐to‐business services and the client. The findings presented here show that the time element is critical to the effect that both service quality and successful customer bonding bear in trust development. Furthermore, the results of the study suggest that not all dimensions of the quality of the service offered by the provider contribute equally in the provider’s trustworthiness. Similarly, specific customer bonding techniques foster the extent to which the client trusts the service provider while others do not have an impact on the trustworthiness of the provider.

This article reports on the results of a research project into the development activities undertaken during the launch of 132 new financial services in Greece. According to the results, business analysis and marketing strategy formation as well as launch are the stages of the new service development process which influence the success of a new service irrespective, for the most part, of the degree of innovativeness that characterizes it. The significance of the other three stages of the development process varies depending the degree of innovativeness that characterizes the new service and the type of objective (financial or not) that management considers in order to evaluate its actual performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of marketing, sales, EDP/systems and operations in the ultimate success of new‐to‐the‐market vs “me‐too” retail financial services.

To collect the data, the “dropping off” method was followed using a self‐administered questionnaire. Respondents were new service development project leaders. The unit of analysis was the service innovation project. After two follow‐up contacts, 114 usable questionnaires were returned from 64 companies, yielding a company response rate of 76 per cent and a project response rate of 68 per cent.

There are significant differences in the involvement of marketing in the stages of business analysis and marketing strategy, technical development, testing and launching, and the involvement of EDP/systems during technical development between “me‐too” and new‐to‐the‐market retail financial services. Further, in the case of new‐to‐the‐market projects, the involvement of marketing and sales positively influences performance. By contrast, the performance of “me‐too” retail financial services is positively affected by the involvement of the technical‐related functions, namely EDP/systems and operations.

The study offers only indirect evidence of a strong link between market orientation adoption and performance of innovative retail financial services. Future research attempts should incorporate a measurement of market orientation and examine directly its relation with the performance of major innovations. Also, the development process is only one of the many factors, which may explain variations in the performance of different new services. Future research is again needed in order incorporate in the analysis measures of such factors and refine the links that this study has revealed.

On the basis of the study's findings, middle and top management may reconsider their new service development process and possibly reassess their practices regarding the different roles that various functions hold during the development process.

While a strong association between Marketing Orientation development and company performance has been established, the understanding of the Marketing Orientation remains unclear since some studies have suggested a philosophical nature for Marketing Orientation and some other studies concluded that Marketing Orientation represents a behavioural notion. As a result of this antithesis, research has not proceeded in the investigation on the factors that determine the degree of Marketing Orientation development. Shows that Marketing Orientation should be conceptualised synthetically since it represents the integration of a certain culture with specific behaviour. Closely examines the major determinants of Marketing Orientation development. Although exploratory in nature, suggests that Marketing Orientation development is determined by company‐specific, as well as by market‐specific factors with the former having a facilitating effect and the latter a coercive effect.