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Business to business (B2B) professional services depend on inter-firm cooperation for the co-creation of value. Such cooperation rarely happens overnight; it requires time for the relationship to develop. The purpose of this research is to investigate how different performance attributes of a professional service differ with the tenure of the relationship.

This exploratory study utilizes seven years of longitudinal customer data provided by a B2B professional service firm. The firm's customers assess satisfaction, value, loyalty, performance quality and their image of the firm after each project.

Data were classified into three tenure related groups – i.e. transactional, emergent and mature relationships. MANOVA and post hoc contrasts of the average attribute scores of the three groups were conducted. The data support the conclusion that high performance in professional services is evident in mature relationships.

Data come from company archives and reflect the firm's efforts for tactical management of client relationships, not independent informant reports from randomly selected accounts.

Satisfaction surveys can be employed tactically by professional service providers to develop stronger relationships with their clients en route to co-creating extraordinary value from high levels of service quality and the client's high regard for the provider's professional qualities, such as expertise, customer focus and initiative.

To the authors' knowledge, no one has shown empirically the dramatic performance advantage stemming from relationships. This is important because theory suggests that customer relationships hold strategic value. Because they are immobile and inimitable, they represent a potential sustainable competitive advantage. However, relationships take time to develop. This begs the question of whether they are worth the time and effort to develop. In the professional service context, where buyer and seller seemingly must collaborate to co-create value, mature relationships indeed yield higher performance, compared to transactional and emerging relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the cross‐cultural efficacy of a gender identity scale commonly used in marketing: the shortened version of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) measure developed by Barak and Stern, the Gender Trait Index (GTI).

Data were collected in the USA, Mexico, and Norway, and confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the cross‐cultural equivalence of the GTI.

Configural, metric and partial scalar invariance of a revised 16‐item measure were supported.

The validated 16‐item GTI scale will enhance measurement applications and theory building in cross‐cultural research, and further the authors' understanding of the role that gender identity plays in consumer decision making.

This paper aims to examine how different ways in which a charitable organization communicates successes (highlighting individual or collective achievement) can influence potential future donors, and to determine whether the effectiveness of the communication strategy is contingent on the cultural context.

Experiments were conducted in the USA and Mexico.

The findings of the study demonstrate that the effectiveness of communications with the public regarding a charitable organization's success stories depends on the type of message used in relation to the cultural context. When the message was congruent with the cultural dimension of individualism‐collectivism, the public was more likely to consider making a contribution to the charity.

The study examined the impact of conveying a message congruent with the cultural context in the context of charitable contributions. Further research is needed to examine whether one would expect a similar result with a different type of charitable organization (issue‐related instead of cause‐related) or a non‐student sample.

The authors found that the effectiveness of communications with the public regarding a charitable organization's success stories depends on the type of message used in relation to the cultural context. Standardizing the message can have adverse implications on the public's intentions to donate to the organization.

Very few studies examine charity advertising in a global setting, and to the authors' knowledge this study is the first to examine communicating success stories to the public. In addition, previous studies do not examine the impact of different advertising appeals on intentions to donate to the charity, an important dependent variable for both researchers and practitioners.