Tore Strandvik

Managing Customer Relationships for Profit: The Dynamics of Relationship Quality

Addresses customer‐relationship economic issues, more specifically the link between service quality and profitability from a relationship marketing and management perspective. In this perspective the task of marketing is not only to establish customer relationships, but also to maintain and enhance them in order to improve customer profitability. In the service quality literature higher quality is assumed to lead to customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty and this drives customer profitability. The framework highlights factors that, in addition to service quality and customer satisfaction, influence the links between service quality and profitability. Also discusses aspects of improving the profitability of relationships, such as enhancing relationship revenues through higher degrees of patronage concentration, and reducing relationship cost by changing the episode configuration of customer relationships.

Emotions in service satisfaction

Traditionally only cognitive measures, such as the disconfirmation of some comparison standard or perceived service performance, have been used to explain perceived service quality and satisfaction. Suggests that emotions could play an important role in determining satisfaction with a service. The results from an empirical study of customers’ experiences of the services of a labour force bureau show that customers experience different positive and negative emotions in connection with the service, and that these emotions influence service satisfaction. Finds that, on an aggregate level, direct disconfirmation of adequate service, together with positive emotions, explain satisfaction best. Identifies four groups of customers with different emotional profiles. Analyses of emotions in these groups show that negative emotions have the largest impact on customer response.

A Customer-dominant Logic of Service

Purpose – The paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and companies in creating value by outlining a customer‐based approach to service. The customers logic is examined in‐depth as being the foundation of a customer‐dominant (CD) marketing and business logic.Design/methodology/approach – The authors argue that both the goods‐ and service‐dominant logic are provider‐dominant. Contrasting the provider‐dominant logic with CD logic, the paper examines the creation of service value from the perspectives of value‐in‐use, the customers own context, and the customers experience of service.Findings – Moving from a provider‐dominant logic to a CD logic uncovered five major challenges to service marketers: company involvement, company control in co‐creation, visibility of value creation, scope of customer experience, and character of customer experience.Research limitations/implications – The paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective and suggests implication...

Estimating Zones of Tolerance in Perceived Service Quality and Perceived Service Value

Focuses on proposing a new method for capturing the customer′s zone of tolerance for service quality. Interprets the zone of tolerance as a kind of inertia regarding behavioural responses to disconfirmation of expectations. Gives a predicted example in which adequate and desired expectations are operationalized by conjoint analysis. Explores the relationship between expectations, service quality, and service value. Gives examples of the kinds of result which one can obtain using the proposed method.

Customer dominant value formation in service

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to extend current discussions of value creation and propose a customer dominant value perspective. The point of origin in a customer‐dominant marketing logic (C‐D logic) is the customer, rather than the service provider, interaction or the system. The focus is shifted from the companys service processes involving the customer, to the customers multi‐contextual value formation, involving the company.Design/methodology/approach – Value formation is contrasted to earlier views on the companys role in value creation in a conceptual analysis focusing on five central aspects. Implications of the proposed characteristics of value formation compared to earlier approaches are put forward.Findings – The paper highlights earlier hidden aspects on the role of a service for the customer. It is proposed that value is not always an active process of creation; instead, value is embedded and formed in the highly dynamic and multi‐contextual reality and life of the customer. This l...

Customer needing: a challenge for the seller offering

Purpose – The present increasingly tough economic climate has uncovered the need to go beyond the prevailing seller‐oriented models and company practices in order to capture the factors that essentially drive buyer companies. What is needed is a genuinely customer‐side concept that corresponds to offering. The purpose of this study is to develop a new concept labeled “customer needing” which emerged from the material collected in an industrial service setting.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports a case study of a typical high‐technology industrial service with a strong outsourcing trend. The empirical data consist of interviews with eight representatives from the seller company and 16 interviews from different customer companies.Findings – A needing is based on the customers mental models of their business and business strategies that affect their priorities, decisions, and actions. It is itself a mental model of how the customer conceives the fulfillment of a specific task. In this paper the ...

Customer-dominant logic: foundations and implications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the theoretical and practical implications of adopting customer-dominant logic (CDL) of service, focusing on how firms can become involved in the customers’ context. Design/methodology/approach – Inspired by the conceptual discussion of service logic and service-dominant logic, this paper focuses on the conceptual underpinnings of CDL. CDL is contrasted with other service perspectives in marketing; CDL is a marketing and business perspective dominated by customer-related aspects instead of products, service, systems, costs or growth. It is grounded in understanding customer logic and how firms’ offerings can become embedded in customers’ lives/businesses. Findings – The conceptual analysis challenges the prevailing assumptions of key phenomena in service research, including interaction, co-creation, service value and service. The paper presents five essential foundations of CDL: marketing as a business perspective, customer logic as the central concept, of...

A Comparison of Episode Performance and Relationship Performance for a Discrete Service

A new service relationship quality model, which makes a distinction between episodes and relationships, is presented. It is argued that customers’ satisfaction with a service is determined by the value of the service, i.e. by service quality compared to sacrifices. This can be evaluated both at an episode and a relationship level. Parts of the model are investigated empirically in a hairdresser context. Hairdresser services are considered discrete services, as opposed to continuos services. Discrete services are services where the customer’s loyalty is based on making a separate decision each time. In the study, service quality is measured as perceived performance of the service, using unmodified Servqual questions. Customers’ perceptions of episode performance and relationship performance of the hairdresser are reported. The relation between the two different performance measures, episode satisfaction, relationship satisfaction and behavioral intentions are studied.

The Mental Footprint of Marketing in the Boardroom

Purpose – Marketing researchers continue to debate the significance of the managerial relevance of marketing, especially in the boardrooms. Despite a growing number of published papers on the topic, it is surprising that there are virtually none on mental models. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents mental models as a perspective to discuss marketings position in companies, and reflects on the marketing mental models of boardroom members and top management. Findings – The paper addresses marketings relevant issues and offers new insights into the role of marketing in companies by highlighting mental models, which drive the boardrooms’ and managers’ attentions, decisions, actions, and evaluations. The paper demonstrates the importance of mental models by introducing and discussing the notion of the mental footprint of marketing, or the impact marketing has on mental models. Research limitations/implications – The rapidly changing business ...

Ethical consumers' brand avoidance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore ethical consumers brand avoidance. The study contributes to brand-avoidance research by exploring what role consumers ethical concerns play in their brand avoidance. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative approach is adopted by interviewing 15 active members of organizations that represent ethical concerns for the well-being of animals, the environment and humans. Findings – The study indicates that consumers with a strong value-based perspective on consumption (such as ethical consumers) may reject brands in two different but interrelated ways. In essence, the study reveals characteristics of brand avoidance that have not been discussed in earlier research, in terms of two dimensions: persistency (persistent vs temporary) and explicitness (explicit vs latent). Practical implications – The study shows the importance of considering the phenomenon of brand avoidance, as it may reveal fundamental challenges in the market. These challenges may relate to...