The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing has published an autobiographic article about the career of Christian Grönross. The article contains personal reflections in an autobiographical approach and records events and memories that might otherwise be forgotten. We are thankful, that Christian provided us with her personal manuscript for this article. An article that is worth to read for every service researcher in the field.
by Christian Grönross
My approach to academic research
Service marketing has always been my major research interest. When I set out to study service firms’ marketing challenges in 1976, I had in mind the conventional view of how to do research, still dominating in many parts of the world. Take the relevant existing body of knowledge, build hypotheses about how to adapt it to a specific context, and test the hypotheses using large-scale samples and statistical methods. For my first tentative model of service marketing, I tried to do just that. However, when attempting to develop a survey to test the model, I gave up. It was impossible to ask questions in a way that would be understandable to respondents responsible for marketing in service firms. My variables and causal assumptions would not fit their marketing frame of reference. As Bjarne Peth, who enrolled in Hanken School of Economics’s undergraduate program at the same time as I, was a teaching assistant in management there for a few years, and then left for a career in business, said about one of my questionnaires: “Why do you go about it this way?” Then he added the obvious remark: “Why don’t you ask people directly?”
I had learnt my lesson. Because what I was trying to develop was too different from prevailing frames of reference and, therefore, difficult to grasp for potential respondents, I chose to do conversation-based case studies. Perhaps one could say that it was an elementary form of ethnography. I also understood that instead of building on an existing approach to marketing, which does not fit the service context very well, I needed to use context-specific terminology and concepts. For example, instead of using the phrase “distributing service”, I concluded that physical resources and employee communication make service available to consumers.
Although it was against commonly accepted rules at that time, very early into my doctoral research I decided to stop trying to adopt the flagship marketing mix management approach with its 4P model. It was too static with its set of decision-making areas. Realising that service is a process and that service marketing requires a dynamic model, I set out to develop a model and a terminology which would fit service as a phenomenon instead. Thus, the dynamic interactive marketing model emerged with its accessibility, interaction and interactive person-to-person communication, and customer participation and influence concepts. As early as 1978, even before I had defended my thesis, Gordon Wills, editor of the European Journal of Marketing, accepted for publication an article about my approach to service marketing. Later, Gordon told me that he took pride in publishing views that stood out and offered new ways of approaching a phenomenon. This article, “A service-orientated approach to the marketing of services”, was later republished as a service marketing classic.
I have never forgotten the lessons I learnt then. In 2000, Ray Fisk, Stephen Grove, and Joby John edited an anthology consisting of the approaches that researchers pioneering service marketing had taken. In my retrospective, I said
If I were to describe my career in service marketing research with just a few words, I would choose to quote Frank Sinatra: “I did it my way”. In my research approach, I have never felt obliged to be constrained by existing paradigms, models, or concepts. If I believed that they did not fit, I put them aside and looked for alternatives. If I could not find anything applicable, I developed something new myself. I have never used an empirical approach that the academic establishment has considered the only accepted or preferred scientific methodology if I did not believe in it. Most often I have found that an alternative approach seemed to fit better. (p. 71)
This is something I have told generations of doctoral students. Only if an extant theory or model can be built on in a meaningful way should it be used as a starting point. Only if what you are studying is known well enough to respondents such that they consistently understand your questions and scale points, and do this in the same way as you intend them to be understood, can you use conventional data-gathering methods and statistical analyses.
Doctoral students and young post-doctoral researchers get a lot of negative feedback from fellow researchers, conference participants, and even senior faculty and supervisors, sometimes considered good advice by the person who gives it. I got more than my fair share of this. A researcher has to be strong in his or her faith. I always advise students and post-docs to believe in themselves and in what they are doing and to listen to comments, but unless they realise there is a better way to do it, never to let themselves be talked out of what they believe in and out of the methodological approach they consider fit for their study. Sometimes advice from other persons is appropriate, but not at all always.
Reviewers’ comments on article submissions are often constructive, but they can also be destructive for anyone’s faith in himself or herself. Sometimes such feedback can be funny. Once I got the advice to read what Grönroos had written. That triggered some laughs, but I had to admit that the reviewer was right. My submission was not thought out well enough.
How it all began
I’ll study at Hanken
“I know what I want to do after school”. This was a defining moment in my career plan, and it was not planned. The year was 1963. I was 16 and attending my final year in secondary school. As part of our education about society, every student was supposed to visit a firm or institution. We had a list of options to choose from. I was shy and did not want to go to an unfamiliar place on my own. This was my attempt to escape. “I’ll study at Hanken”, I added. My brother, almost 12 years older than I, had a degree from Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, and this was the only university-level institution of which I had at least some vague notion. My knowledge of other higher education options was next to nothing.
My avoidance tactics failed. However, this incident in the classroom turned out to be critical for my whole future. During my three years in high school, no continued educational path stood out in particular. Naturally, toward my final year in high school I realised that I had to start thinking about the future. However, having once expressed the thought that I would continue my education with business school studies at Hanken, I avoided thinking about post-high school education, at first unconsciously and later consciously. I might as well continue in my brother’s footsteps, so I did not bother to think about alternatives.
I did not plan this career choice. In this way it just came to me, and it turned out quite well in the end. It could have gone another way. In school I was fascinated by history. I had always had good history grades. During my school years I even wrote a fictional history. It would probably have been only natural to get a degree in history. Interestingly, my daughter Henrika chose a career in history and is now at the University of Helsinki. My son Mickel, on the other hand, has gone into business as an information management consultant. In hindsight, I have come to understand that my “I’ll study at Hanken!” outcry in secondary school first unconsciously and then consciously blocked the thought of other career opportunities.
How I got interested in thinking about an academic career
I enrolled in the bachelor program at Hanken in the autumn of 1966. I enjoyed studying, but I had never seriously thought of a career in academia. My father and older brother were both in business, and I had the idea that after a bachelor’s degree I would follow in their footsteps. However, my thoughts became distracted. It was a warm day in June 1969. I had an internship at Ford Motor Company in Helsinki and was dressed in business attire. I had to go to the marketing department at Hanken and submit my final project report for the bachelor’s degree. There in his office, Henrik Calonius, senior lecturer in marketing, sat in shorts and a short-sleeve shirt. It was summer break. I was formally dressed, and sweaty. At that moment it occurred to me that a job in academia would be quite nice.
In the third and final year of bachelor’s studies, we had to choose our main subject. I chose marketing. This was not because I was passionate about marketing or found it particularly interesting. In fact, I considered accounting most interesting but at the same time boring. In my view, economics was overly theoretical and particularly microeconomics unrealistic. What personnel and organisational behaviour really were about I never understood. Management was very mathematical and did not appeal to me then. I wanted to choose a business administration subject as my major, so I was left with marketing. To me, marketing was rather fuzzy as well and even trivial, but there was nothing more to choose from. However, I remember that I found it somehow fascinating as well.
During the third year of my studies, marketing started to become interesting. In the summer of 1969 I had finished everything for the bachelor’s degree and got my diploma. However, I had six months to spend before I was expected to begin my 11-month military service. I continued with a part-time job at Ford but understood that until I had finished my military service, it would be difficult to get a permanent job. To keep myself occupied I decided to apply for master’s studies at Hanken and enrolled in the seminar course in marketing, where students were prepared for doing a master’s thesis. Before the end of the semester I had finished the seminar and joined the military.
Three phone calls that determined my academic career
Professor Mickwitz needs a temporary teaching assistant. Are you interested?
Toward the end of my year in the military I had to start thinking about getting a job. Then fate intervened. During my last month of military service, Maj Lodman called: “Professor Mickwitz needs a temporary teaching assistant. Are you interested?” Maj had enrolled in the bachelor’s program at Hanken at the same time as I and subsequently became teaching assistant to Gösta Mickwitz, who was a professor in economics but had responsibility for marketing at Hanken as well. Maj was in the economics department, but now Gösta needed a teaching assistant in marketing. He had asked her if she knew someone who was pursuing master’s studies in marketing. She knew that I had done the master’s seminar in marketing. This was early January 1971. I had gotten interested in studying marketing during the seminar a year ago, and Henrik Calonius in shorts and short-sleeve shirt in his office on a hot summer day came to my mind. And I would not have to start applying for a job. My career in academia began. Again, my future could have taken another turn. When Maj called, I just happened to be at home on a short leave from the military. Had she waited a day to contact me, I would have already returned to my unit and not been able to answer her call.
At the time, and during the 1970s and into the 80s, although originally an economist, Gösta Mickwitz was the internationally most well-known marketing scholar in Finland. Together with Hans Brems, Max Kjaer Hansen and Arne Rasmussen and others, he belonged to the Copenhagen School of scholars, who were unsatisfied with what they considered the limited realism of microeconomics. Kjaer Hansen first introduced the concept of action parameters. To advance Chamberlin’s work on monopolistic competition in the 1930s, Gösta developed parameter theory, based on the elasticities of not only price, quality and promotion but a number of other parameters, including service and quasi-quality (today this variable would perhaps be labelled design). He considered Chamberlin’s work more a criticism of price theory than an elaborate development of a theory of competition. Gösta had introduced parameter theory in 1959 in his book Marketing and Competition. This created some interest among marketing academics, but because it turned out to be difficult to operationalise the variables and their elasticities, parameter theory was eventually forgotten.
During my last year of bachelor’s studies and a few years of my continued studies, Gösta served as a professor of marketing. He became my mentor. Gösta Mickwitz was open-minded and taught his students to think freely and challenge existing knowledge as well as to think conceptually. I do not think I appreciated this fully while he was in the marketing department, but later when I got into studying service firms and their marketing challenges, his influence on my thinking and my choices became evident to me. He had a quick intellect and could enter a room and almost instantly throw himself into an ongoing discussion. When lecturing, he always faced the class, even when he was drawing graphs on the blackboard. Suddenly he would stop speaking, turn to his drawing, and say “Ah! Let’s see what we have here”. At the student union’s annual parties with faculty members, in the afterhours Gösta invariably sat in the bar, surrounded by a group of students, explaining the secrets of economics and marketing behaviour. He also told his doctoral students that there were two kinds of doctoral theses, namely those that are perfect and those that get finished. I have always considered this great wisdom and have forwarded it to my students.
We need someone to do a theoretical presentation of marketing in service firms. Can you do it?
In March 1976, fate intervened once again. I had finished my master’s studies and produced a forgettable licentiate thesis on decision models based on Bayesian statistics. An article based on this thesis was published in the European Journal of Marketing. This article was never cited. I was looking for a topic for a doctoral thesis but did not like the ideas that came up. I wanted to do something that would make a mark and not just duplicate or validate earlier studies or models.
I had already for some time doubted whether a career in academia was for me after all. I was even contemplating whether I should begin to look for a job in business. Then my phone rang: “We need someone to do a theoretical presentation of marketing in service firms. Can you do it?” It was Kurt Kääriäinen, who also had enrolled in the bachelor’s program at Hanken at the same time as I and for some time worked as a teaching assistant in the management department. Subsequently, he had left Hanken to pick up a job in business. The company he worked for had conducted a study of marketing challenges in the hospitality industry in Finland. As the junior employee with the most recent contacts with academic research, Kurt was asked to look for someone who could present service marketing challenges on a theoretical level at a public seminar to be arranged. Kurt and I had studied together, although he had majored in management, and we had been colleagues for a few years. He came to think of me.
Kurt’s phone call came out of the blue. At the time, as a last attempt to find a reason to stay in academia, I was exploring the field of marketing higher education as a topic for a doctoral thesis. I told him that I had no idea what service marketing was all about. Kurt responded that nobody seemed to do that. I gave this a quick thought and then had the good sense to answer that I might as well be the one who did the presentation. That reply turned out to be a second defining moment in my academic career. I put my work on higher education marketing on hold for a while and looked for publications on the marketing of services. I found two books, a few journal articles, and one doctoral thesis. Much was descriptive, and the conceptual thinking was very much in its infancy. What had the greatest impact on me was the notion expressed by John Rathmell in 1974 that when attempting to integrate conventional marketing terms and concepts with firms and institutions in the service field that have old customs, tradition, and practices of their own, “… the linkage appears awkward and even improper” (p. vii). His observation that, unlike in conventional marketing, in service firms there is an interface between the organisation’s production process and consumption that is bound to have an impact on customers, was another eye-opener.
I prepared a presentation on the marketing of services, but then Kurt called me up again. The seminar had been cancelled. It turned out to be ahead of its time. However, I wanted to use my findings somehow. Realising that education is a service, I added the findings as a section in my research proposal about higher education marketing. At the end of the spring semester 1976, I presented my proposal at a department seminar. It was not well received. It was considered too unfocused. After the seminar my fellow doctoral student Lars (Lars-Johan) Lindqvist, later a professor and associate dean at Hanken’s Vasa campus, and I left Hanken for lunch. I still remember the very spot, we were crossing the street dividing Hanken from the Helsinki School of Economics, where Lars said: “Your proposal wasn’t good, but the section on service marketing was interesting. Keep that and throw out the rest”. When we returned from lunch, I had made up my mind and decided to follow Lars’s suggestion. My journey as an explorer of service as a marketing and even business perspective had begun. Later, throughout the 1990s Lars and I taught service marketing in executive programmes together.
I would like you to submit a paper to the upcoming AMA special conference on the marketing of services
Four years later, in the autumn of 1980, fate knocked on my door once again. My phone rang: “I would like you to submit a paper to the upcoming AMA (American Marketing Association) special conference on the marketing of services next spring”. It was William George, then a professor at Rutgers University and later at Villanova University, who had called. He was co-chair of this upcoming first special conference on the marketing of services in the US, and he wanted me to be part of it. I had defended my doctoral thesis, written in Swedish, half a year earlier in January 1979, and I could not expect anyone to be interested in my work yet, especially not anyone from abroad. However, Bill had probably seen my article “A service-orientated approach to the marketing of services” published in 1978 in the European Journal of Marketing and had become interested in my unconventional approach. I guess he was also looking for some persons from outside North America who could contribute to the conference.
In the spring of 1981 in Orlando, Florida, together with Evert Gummesson from Sweden and Clive Porter from Australia, I attended what turned out to be the first of a continuing series of service marketing conferences arranged annually by the American Marketing Association and later co-arranged with Roland Rust, a professor at the University of Maryland, as Frontiers in Services. I presented papers at each of the conferences long into the 1990s. For the first conference, following Bill’s suggestion, I prepared a paper based on my 1978 article. It was rejected. The reviewers either thought it was not providing anything of value to the advancement of the marketing of services, or its vision was ahead of its time. I like to think it was the latter. However, at that time I was also exploring the idea of internal marketing, and I also submitted a paper on that topic. It was accepted. Off I went to Orlando.
In hindsight I believe that Bill George’s interest in my ideas, which had led him to call me, was of utmost importance to my international career. I had attended one service workshop in France and some general marketing conferences in Europe. However, the opportunity to attend the first AMA special conference with close to 100 participants gave me a chance to be involved in pioneering international research into the service field from the outset. Had Bill not called me, I may have missed the train and internationally become a latecomer to the field and missed the pioneering years. Now all of a sudden I was from the very beginning right in the centre of where service marketing was developing as a new international field of research.
Being a service marketing researcher in the 1970s
Getting started
I put higher education marketing aside and started to explore the marketing challenges of service firms further. Based on the literature review, which had not produced very much, and on John Rathmell’s observations that the service production-consumption interface may have a marketing impact and that new concepts and models may be needed, I first sketched a tentative conceptual model of service marketing. I thought that the production-consumption interface was probably at least equally important to the success of a service firm’s marketing as conventional marketing mix activities. Moreover, I postulated that the products and other tangible resources used in this interface, together with employee-consumer communication, work as bearers or carriers of service. Originally, I used the phrase they “distribute the service concept”, an observation that 30 years later was picked up in the discussion of service as a marketing perspective. Later, after some empirical work, I realised that, according to practitioners, distribute was too goods related and dropped that wording and decided to develop a service-specific terminology instead.
Today, at Hanken we are seven senior faculty members in the marketing department taking an interest in service marketing and management and related areas as well as a whole bunch of post-doc researchers and doctoral candidates. Back in 1976 in the department, there was one – me. It was not easy to be alone with your topic and your vision. My fellow doctoral student Lars found them interesting, but his area was distribution. Being alone in the department studying service marketing is not extraordinary. Most doctoral students all over the world were in that position throughout the 1980s and 90s and many still are. The difference is that in the late 1970s, there seemed to be no one else in the entire academic world interested in the field whom I could turn to and discuss with. As it soon turned out, it was not to be as lonely as that, but it took time to find all three others in Europe.
I set out to develop a new conceptual model, which did not honour conventional marketing thinking and did not build on it, and soon I decided to use a methodological approach unconventional at the time as well. I turned to case studies. With the wrong supervisor, my career as service marketing researcher could have ended before it had even gained pace. By 1976, Gösta Mickwitz had returned to the economics department, and a new young marketing professor, Alf-Erik Lerviks, had taken over. Luckily, I got Alf-Erik as supervisor. He had studied consumer behaviour in the consumer goods field and was into decision-making, and he was a quantitative researcher. I was anything but that. Alf-Erik said from the outset that he did not understand the service field and the case methodology I suggested. However, he is an open-minded person, and my topic seemed interesting to him, although rather difficult to comprehend, and during the 1970s a few doctoral theses in marketing using case studies had been accepted in Sweden, albeit not in Finland. “Go ahead, I’ll support you”, Alf-Erik said.
In academia, new approaches may be interesting but not easily accepted
At Hanken my topic had been formally accepted. Alf-Erik Lerviks supported me, but his subject and methodological interests were elsewhere. No one else understood what I was doing. Hence, I had to believe in myself and my vision, my ability to think logically, and my capability to do conceptual development and make productive empirical choices. Even more importantly, I had to resist being talked out of my vision by colleagues, fellow doctoral students, and others. There were many of them.
Outside Hanken the situation was the same. Fellow doctoral students with whom I had discussed my topic told me, “Christian, service marketing sounds interesting, but when are you going to start exploring a real topic for a doctoral thesis?” In August 1977, a national workshop for doctoral students in business administration from all business schools and universities in Finland was arranged. The theme was “Exploring the status of doctoral studies in business administration”. The most senior professors in the country chaired the workshop groups. The marketing group consisted of eight students. I had prepared a conceptual paper describing my approach and tentative conceptual model. Along with the others I presented my paper. As far as I can remember, the professor said nothing then. However, I do vividly remember his comments when he summarised the status of doctoral studies in Finland before the other professors and all participants: “In marketing the situation is mostly good. Out of the eight doctoral candidates, six are right on track, one needs some refocusing, and then there is one who probably won’t make it”. I knew whom he meant, and so did everyone else. In such situations, you need to be strong in your faith and really believe in what you are doing. I remember that I told myself that I would prove him wrong.
Approximately a year later, in 1978, Philip Kotler visited Finland. There was another nationwide event for marketing faculty and doctoral candidates arranged at the Helsinki School of Economics, where Philip gave an overview of the marketing field and discussed research topics in marketing. During the Q&A session, Uolevi Lehtinen, a post-doc researcher a few years older than me and later a professor of marketing and rector of the University of Tampere, asked what he thought of studying marketing in service firms, in view of Lynn Shostack’s recently published “Breaking free from product marketing” article in the Journal of Marketing. Philip said that he was not convinced that marketing in service firms would require new concepts and models. Right after the session, Uolevi asked me whether I still dared to continue with service marketing for my doctoral degree.
Then fate intervened again, and I got a chance to discuss my service marketing vision with Philip Kotler. Later that day he was going to a conference site an hour’s drive from Helsinki to give an executive seminar. However, evidently there were some problems with transportation. Meeri Saarsalmi, a marketing professor at the Helsinki School of Economics, knew that I was doing a doctoral thesis on service marketing. She came over and asked whether I could drive Philip to the conference site. “You may get an opportunity to discuss your study with him”, she said. I said yes immediately. During the one-hour trip I told Philip that in spite of his comment earlier that day, I thought that service firms had problems applying conventional marketing models and concepts and needed a new approach. He asked me to describe my thoughts on this issue and soon took out a pen and a notebook and started to make some notes. I realised that undoubtedly I could continue pursuing my service marketing vision.
About two decades later, when Philip Kotler and I met at a conference in Stockholm, he referred to that trip in 1978 and mentioned that I then had said that I intended to make a mark with my research. “You really have accomplished that”, he added. I had totally forgotten that I had dared to be that bold as a doctoral candidate. Over the years I have met up with Philip several times, visited him in Evanston, and hosted his visit to Hanken, and we have discussed service and relationship marketing. He has graciously written endorsements for some of my service management and marketing books.
In business, new approaches are interesting and acceptable
Although academia did not offer much support, another sector of society showed much more interest in what I was doing. In Sweden, a recently established organisation called MTC (Marketing Technique Centre) had a number of theme groups, so-called experience groups, where practitioners came together to share experiences. One theme was marketing challenges in service firms. I asked for an opportunity to present my thoughts. I was invited to come to Stockholm in August 1976 to attend one of the group’s meetings. By then I had already developed a tentative conceptual view of service marketing, and even before I had a chance to present it to my supervisor, I shared it with a group of service marketing practitioners. My presentation was received enthusiastically: finally, someone who studies marketing challenges from service firms’ perspective, I was told. When confronted with the suspicion and negativism expressed by academics, such experiences with practitioners help me stay determined.
The following year I was invited by one of the group members, Rolf Attoff, marketing director of a large hotel and restaurant chain in Sweden, to speak about service marketing at an executive meeting. In Finland, Kalevi Etelä, then marketing director of Silja Line, operating sea transportation between Finland and Sweden, asked me to join an internal marketing process with the aim to develop a customer focus among the firm’s employees. Åke Hammarin, later director of IHM (Institute of Higher Marketing Education) in Sweden, arranged an open executive seminar on service marketing with me in Gothenburg. All of this happened before I had finished my doctoral thesis.
These connections with marketing practitioners were invaluable. They confirmed that I was doing something interesting and something that would be helpful to marketing practice. They helped me see the shortcomings of conventional marketing concepts and models and the many ways service firms tried to overcome them in practice. They gave me a network which provided access to service firms that I could use in formal empirical research. Later I spoke at executive conferences and in-house meetings throughout the world. I think I have presented service and relationship marketing and management issues in all industries that one can think of, everything from cleaning firms and advertising agencies to paper mills and nuclear plants. Throughout the 1980s and 90s there was so few others in Finland and Sweden talking about these topics that I was constantly introduced as the service guru.
Finding like-minded souls
In April 1977 I presented my service marketing study and tentative model in Saarbrücken, Germany, at the annual conference of the European Academy for Advanced Research in Marketing, later EMAC (European Marketing Academy), and in January 1978 in Helsinki at a Nordic conference on research in management. The audiences showed no enthusiasm. However, by then I had already found the three researchers in Europe whose visions about how to develop service marketing coincided with mine.
By August 1976, at the experience-sharing meeting arranged in Stockholm by MTC, I had met Evert Gummesson, later a professor at Stockholm University. We soon noticed that we were equally alone with our thesis work and, as we considered it, not properly understood, he in Sweden and myself in Finland. Over the years, Evert I have become good friends and have had long discussions about service and relationships, and about life as well, and even exchanged houses at one time. When we both became part of the service marketing movement in North America, albeit taking rather different approaches than the mainstream American one, we had substantial support from each other. Of all service marketing researchers, Evert has meant most to me.
In 1977, EIASM (European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management) held a workshop on service marketing research. This small-scale workshop arranged for EIASM by IAE (Institute d’Administration des Enterprises) at Université d’Aix-Marseille took place at a conference site close to IAE’s premises outside Aix-en-Provence, France. There I met Pierre Eiglier and Eric Langeard from IAE. Evert was also there. For the first time, I was in an environment where a group of academics believed in the same vision as I did. Pierre’s and Eric’s “servuction model” immediately appealed to me. It expressed the same criticism of conventional goods marketing and also included similar elements as those in my vision, emphasising the vital role of service employees, physical resources in the service environment, and customers. When I developed my tentative model further into the interactive marketing model for service firms, their model was an important source of inspiration. They demonstrated the need to put on new glasses and take a fresh look at how to develop service marketing. Eric Langeard left academia and sadly passed away too early. I am very pleased that the service and relationship research centre at Hanken, CERS (Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management), in 2015 acknowledged Pierre Eiglier’s contribution to the service field by presenting him with the Grönroos Service Research Award. Earlier, Evert Gummesson also received this recognition.
At the end of the 1970s I also met Richard Normann, who had left a position as a professor at Lund University in Sweden to become a consultant in service management. From a management perspective, Richard developed a service management system in parallel with Evert’s and my research. He became a highly recognised advisor among top management in service enterprises. I spoke at an executive seminar in Paris in 1979 arranged by Richard’s firm, and even for a short while considered leaving academia to join his consultancy business. However, I soon realised that this would not have worked out and decided to stay in academia.
After the workshop in France, I realised that there were at least a few other persons with visions similar to mine, and I started to feel comfortable with fighting off attempts to make me deviate from my vision and pick up a “serious topic” for a doctoral thesis in marketing instead. In 1993 I told Len Berry and Parsu Parasuraman about my feeling then for their analysis of the development of the service marketing field: “Just meeting two academics who were ‘believers’ when the academic establishment at best showed no interest … was a great encouragement to continue doing research in services” (Berry and Parasuraman, 1993, p. 26).
Finishing my doctoral thesis on service marketing
In January 1979 I defended my thesis, with the title Marketing of services: A study of the marketing function in service firms. Clas Wahlbin, later a professor at Linköping University and rector of Jönköping University in Sweden, who was my official opponent, and Solveig Wikström, later a professor at Lund University and Stockholm University, had read the manuscript and offered comments and suggestion. Their viewpoints were encouraging. The defence went well. However, the thesis was awarded the grade non sine laude approbatur, one step below the scale’s middle point. I assumed this was understandable. The topic was new, my approach was unconventional, and my methodological choices were new as well. On the other hand, the thesis, which was written in Swedish, was published by a publisher in Sweden and sold on the market for 10 years. My doctoral thesis was also translated into Finnish, and it sold well for many years on the Finnish market. As it turned out, both students and practitioners were interested in my doctoral thesis.[i]
Getting appointed as a professor
In Finland, as in many other countries, in addition to having a solid enough scientific background there has to be a vacant position for a person to be promoted to professor. When I finished my doctoral studies, a fortunate development took place. A new position as professor of international and industrial marketing was established at Hanken. To be eligible I had to do additional scientific work, of course, but the new position must not filled by anyone before I was ready for it. I was fortunate. The Hanken rector handpicked a candidate for this new position, but, luckily for me, he acted two years as professor but did not deliver, and he did not get the position in the end. Meanwhile, I applied my interactive marketing model from the doctoral thesis on industrial service, using case methodology once again, and published a report on the marketing of services to industrial buyers in 1980. In 1979 I also prepared a conceptual working paper on internationalising strategies for services. The following year, four international marketing and international business journals rejected it. These publications did not convince the reviewers assessing my eligibility for the professorship either. Interestingly, 20 years later this internationalisation paper was published in the Journal of Services Marketing as an invited paper, somewhat further developed to take into account the emergence of the Internet and electronic commerce. Sixteen years after that I was asked to write a retrospective on that article. Perhaps it was ahead of its time back in 1979–80.
However, I had continued my work on service, for example by analysing internal marketing and how customers perceive service quality. I first published a paper on service quality in Swedish in 1980 and presented my service quality model in English in 1982 at a workshop on Research into the Management in Service Businesses arranged at the London Business School. There, among other persons, I met Donald Cowell, then at Loughborough University of Technology, who in 1984 published the first textbook on service marketing in the English language, structured according to the 7P model introduced by Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner in 1981 at the first AMA conference on service marketing. In 1984, my most cited article, “A service quality model and its marketing implications”, was published in the European Journal of Marketing. It is still the most cited article published in this journal. This was the first time, in service research at least, that the perspective on quality was shifted from the quality manufacturer to the customers.
The quality model emerged from a large consultancy and action research process at the Kone Corporation, one of the largest global elevator manufacturing and service firms, based in Finland. At the executive seminar on service management arranged by Richard Norrmann’s firm in 1979 in Paris, I met Tor-Erik Sandelin, then Vice President of global service operations at Kone. He invited me to join a service operations development process, which the firm had initiated. In this process, it became clear that the firms’ and its customers’ definitions of quality differed considerably. When firms traditionally concentrate on the quality of the product or service outcome, normally their customers take this for granted and judge the firms’ capabilities based on behavioural, process-related quality aspects.
I decided to do a larger study, partly testing my interactive marketing model and its concepts and partly introducing and testing my new conceptual developments using more traditional methods. In 1982 a major report, “Strategic management and marketing in the service sector”, was published in English in Hanken’s research report series. Kone used this report for several years in their internal development processes. The following year this report took me to a Marketing Science Institute (MSI) meeting in the US, where I again got a chance to discuss service marketing with Philip Kotler once again. MSI decided to publish the report in its series, and it was also published in the UK. Both in North America and in Europe this report sold quite well for almost 10 years.
In 1984 my eligibility for the professorship was assessed a second time, and finally I passed. I had been fortunate. During the previous four years three other persons had applied for this position, but they were all turned down. I became a professor of international and industrial marketing at the Hanken School of Economics. However, although I taught some international marketing courses, I was passionate about service marketing and management and relationship marketing, and I did research within these fields. In 1999, I asked Hanken to change the name of my professorship to reflect my research and teaching interest better. The academic council and the board accepted my proposal. After 15 years as a professor of international and industrial marketing, I became a professor of service and relationship marketing for the next 15 years.
Internationalising an unconventional service marketing approach
The Nordic school
Evert Gummesson and I had presented our rather unconventional views on service marketing at the first AMA service marketing conference in 1981. There we met persons from the US who have done pioneering work in the field, such as Len Berry, Stephen Brown, Larry Crosby, and Ray Fisk, who have all visited me in Helsinki and have taught at Hanken and I have visited their homes in the US, as well as John Bateson, Mary Jo Bitner, Christopher Lovelock, and many others. The participants showed polite interest in our presentations, but we both got the impression that our viewpoints were considered odd and outside the boundaries of marketing. However, my thoughts on internal marketing, a topic that Len Berry had also worked on, created so much interest that I was invited to join the opening panel presentation session of the next conference to be arranged in 1982.
The topic I suggested, “Innovative marketing strategies and organisational structures for service firms”, was accepted. Evert’s submission also got a favourable response. Hence, we were both going to the conference. In the spring of 1982, Evert was visiting me in Helsinki. He has always been fond of going to sauna. Therefore, we spent some time in my sauna. In Finland, a sauna is place where people discuss important issues and make far-reaching decisions. We discussed the challenge of being two researchers from small countries in the northernmost corner of Europe with odd views on service marketing and, although interesting, far outside the mainstream. Frankly, we had the feeling that the North American researchers did not take our viewpoints seriously enough. Although we were studying different aspects of service marketing, Evert and I had a similar approach to the field, and our methodological choices were basically the same. We concluded that actually we were not two odd service marketing researchers from far away but rather we were members of a movement, a distinct but different school of thought. There and then in my sauna, the Nordic school of service marketing thought was born.
One central tenet of the Nordic school is indeed that marketing in service contexts has to be reinvented and break out of its conventional one-function, one-department boundaries. It has to become an organisation-wide customer focus rather than one function alone. Therefore, we started to talk about service management instead of service marketing, where service management is defined as the market-oriented, customer-focused management of service. A key aspect of the Nordic school’s epistemology is that knowledge should be developed to fit a phenomenon, such as service, and not, as conventional wisdom then said, existing models and concepts adapted to a new context. Basically, The Nordic school approach is based on an ontology of understanding. Theory development is favoured over theory testing, and is actually considered more important, although when appropriate the latter may also take place.
The Nordic school of thought is an underpinning, unifying way of thinking about how to do research into the service and relationship field and related areas. It is not a dogma, one framework, or one scientific approach. There is no ideological requirement to think or do according to an accepted format. The guideline is to step ahead and confront what you do not agree with, and never be restricted by existing theories, frameworks, models, or concepts, nor by dominant scientific approaches and methods. When you follow this guideline, there is a fair chance that you will see opportunities, and solutions, no one else has seen before.
Because of its boundary-spanning and boundary-breaking traditions, the Nordic school approach differs from the mainstream. It urges researchers to dig where no one else has dug before, where no one has even seen the possibility of a hole, so that they may find something interesting. As Annika Ravald from Hanken’s Vasa campus formulated it, “when you break out of the existing box, you’ll find that there is no box”. Actually, there were never any boxes. The world is free for everyone to explore and make sense of. A box is only a construction in the minds of scholars. In the worst and unfortunately not too uncommon case, the research community intersubjectively decides that such a box represents almost a universal truth and, by doing this, it creates a hindrance for researchers to see new things and extend knowledge beyond existing boundaries.
At the service conference in 1982, which took place in West Palm Beach, Florida, in my panel presentation I introduced my “innovative strategies and organisational structures” as representing the Nordic school of thought. Ray Fisk later told me that he distinctly spotted a determined twinkle in my eyes when I made this remark. Evert and I were determined to lift our thoughts on how to develop service marketing to a level above ours as individuals. In their 1993 analysis of service marketing as a developing new field, published in the Journal of Retailing, Len Berry and Parsu Parasuraman list the Nordic school as one of three internationally recognised schools of thought in service marketing research. The others are the North American and the French schools.
Relationship marketing
At the third AMA special service marketing conference in 1983, Len Berry introduced the term “relationship marketing” and demonstrated how it fits service firms. His presentation resonated well with my view of service marketing. After some years, I started to explore the relational aspect further. In 1989, I presented a paper on relationship marketing at the biannual congress of the Academy of Marketing Science in Singapore and the EMAC (European Marketing Academy) annual conference in Athens, Greece. In 1989 and 1990, I also published articles on defining marketing from a relational perspective in the European Journal of Marketing and Management Decision. There I introduced a relationship definition of marketing as a Nordic school definition.
These papers and articles triggered yet another phone call that changed the direction of my career. In 1992, David Ballantyne called me from Australia and invited me to come to Melbourne to speak at a colloquium in relationship marketing, which he was planning for 1993. David had a background in financial services and now was associated with Monash University. Later he earned a doctoral degree from Hanken and became an associate professor at Otago University, New Zealand. He had taken an interest in the relational approach to marketing. He offered to pay for transportation and accommodation. That was too tempting to be rejected. I accepted on the spot. This was the beginning of a series of annual colloquia, and in 2017 it is in its 25th year. I chaired this relationship marketing event twice, in 1996 and again in 2015, then together with my colleague Johanna Gummerus. At these colloquia I met several professors interested in relationship marketing, among them Pennie Frow, Shelby Hunt, Adrian Palmer, and Adrian Payne. I also presented my approaches at relationship marketing conferences arranged outside Atlanta, Georgia, by Jagdish Sheth and Atul Parvatiyar from Emory University. Together with Jagdish Sheth I co-chaired a similar event in Dublin, Ireland, where I, among others, met Don Schultz, who has visited Hanken several times. With Don I had the opportunity to discuss integrated marketing communication and become informed about its possibilities and restrictions.
In the 2000s, at David Ballantyne’s initiative, Otago University arranged three symposia on service research in Dunedin. Then my wife, Viveca, and I had a chance to stay in his house in Port Chalmers, which in many ways is quite fantastic. When David was visiting Hanken, we invited David and his wife Jackie to our holiday house in Finland’s southwestern archipelago, where, among other things, David and I spent time in my seafront sauna.
This invitation to Melbourne made me turn my research interest to relationship marketing. I published a number of articles, among them my second most cited article, “From marketing mix to relationship marketing: Toward a paradigm shift in marketing”, published in 1994 in the Management Decision. This article was based on my presentation with the same title at the first International Colloquium in Relationship Marketing arranged in Melbourne. That presentation was published in the Asia-Australia Journal of Marketing. It is still one of the most cited and read articles published in Management Decision.
For more than a decade into the 2000s I considered relationship marketing the over-arching phenomenon and service a means of implementing it. However, with the discussion of service as a perspective or logic, I have returned to my roots. Relationships certainly demand service to be maintained. However, service – defined as “support to an individual’s or organisations’s everyday processes in a way that contributes to this individual’s or organisations’s value creation” (adapted from Grönroos and Gummerus, 2015, p. 208) – instead of delivering resources, is to me now the guiding perspective on marketing. The management of relationships with customers, based on the many contacts and interfaces that exist between a firm and its customer, are the means to implement service as marketing and business logic. Of course, relationships do not necessarily always develop.
Service as marketing and business logic
In the 2000s, with the introduction of service-dominant logic, service as a perspective on marketing became a focal area within service research. At first, this discussion resonated well with my Nordic school’s view on service as a perspective and my original assumption that service is distributed to consumers through products and other physical resources, a formulation which I later abandoned as language that was too goods-oriented. What I have found problematic is the vague positioning of the perspective in a macro-micro frame. It is normally positioned on a macro level but is formulated such that it could include micro interpretations as well. Moreover, it lacks proper definitions of key concepts, such as value, value creation, co-creation, and interaction. In my view, service-dominant logic is a macro-level conceptualisation, studying systems of actors in a service ecosystem instead of studying actors in their managerial context and, as such, points out important elements on that level influencing the implementation of the service perspective. Perhaps the most important ones are its institutional framework and the understanding that several actors contribute to the value that emerges for the customer and for other actors in the process as well. However, the metaphorical use of the word “co-create” to illustrate this is problematic and lends itself to misinterpretations.
During the past 10 years, together with colleagues at Hanken, I have concentrated on developing a micro interpretation of the service perspective, which we have labelled service logic. In a number of articles, together with Annika Ravald, Päivi Voima, and Johanna Gummerus, we have published what we consider the foundations of a managerially relevant theory of the service perspective on marketing and business, meaningful to managerial decision-making. Service logic is based on micro interpretations of value, value creation, co-creation, interaction, and many other concepts. Lately, my colleagues Tore Strandvik and Kristina Heinonen, both professors at Hanken, have developed what they label CDL (customer-dominant logic), a customer-based view of how value emerges in a customer ecosystem. In a digital anthology of research in the Nordic school tradition, published in 2015, Tore, Kristina, and I combined the customer-based, customer-dominant logic with the management-based service logic into a comprehensive view of the service perspective.
Marketing theory
Although service and relationship marketing have been my main fields of research, I have always taken an interest in other topics as well. The lack of explanatory power of conventional goods-based marketing concepts and models for service and relationship marketing, which I had already observed when working on my doctoral thesis in the 1970s, has bothered me throughout my career. To me, marketing is about making a firm or any organisation meaningful to its customers. In my view, the rather simplistic conventional marketing mix management approach with its 4P model keeps marketing in a straitjacket. It is easy to teach, to understand, and to implement in practice, even in situations where it does not fit well. For example, the Nordic school’s research into the service and relationship fields demonstrates how correct John Rathmell was in assuming that important marketing-like effects on the customers’ behaviour occur outside the realm of conventional marketing.
In 2005, there was a major special section on “the renaissance of marketing” in the Journal of Marketing. I had high hopes, but what a disappointment. Stephen Brown from ASU pointed out how conventional marketing mainly makes promises to customers and creates brand awareness, whereas it is the responsibility of other business function to make sure that customers become satisfied with what they have bought. He made the reader aware of the notion that this is a problem that must be addressed. However, in all other contributions to this special section, the authors only discussed how challenges could be met and problems solved within the conventional framework. Not much of a renaissance, I thought.
In the 1980s in a conference paper, Henrik Calonius, who back in 1966 had a role in making me at least emotionally aware of the virtues of academia, introduced promise theory for marketing. This seminal paper was posthumously published in a 2006 issue of the Marketing Theory. Henrik demonstrated how marketing, to be successful, is a matter of making and keeping promises. Only in the case of ordinary consumer goods, where the product is the only variable which has an impact on promise keeping, do conventional marketing’s models work well. In all other situations, they are to varying degrees insufficient. Within the Nordic school tradition, for example, I developed an interactive marketing model, and Evert Gummesson introduced the part-time marketer concept to cope with this insufficiency. Similar examples exist within the French school (the servuction model) and the North American school (the 7P model) of service marketing.
In 2006, based on Henrik’s promise theory I introduced a promise management model of marketing in an article in the Marketing Theory sketching “a new roadmap for marketing”. The model emphasises the need not only to make promises but also to create the structures needed to make sure that promises made are successfully kept. I also pointed out that traditional product development is not enough to guarantee that promise making and keeping is properly enabled. This approach requires marketing to break out of its one-function, one-department structure. Marketing cannot be organised as we are used to. Instead of being a separate function only, managed by full-time marketing professionals, in the part-time marketers of the rest of the organisation the willingness and capability to keep promises must be developed to facilitate promise keeping. Here, marketing becomes a customer-focused attitude of mind. So far, promise management has not caught much interest by marketing scholars. Conventional marketing still dominates and occupies the minds of researchers and practitioners alike. However, marketing is on a downward slope. I am convinced that its time will come.
Marketing communication
Marketing communication is another topic I have been interested in. To me, marketing communication, and even IMC (integrated marketing communication), does not properly take into account the entire communication spectrum and the customer as a user of communication messages. In the 1980s, Dan Rubinstein, a friend of mine who at the time managed a medium-sized advertising agency, and I published a report on “total communication” in MTC’s working paper series. In the 1990s and 2000s, I published articles on this topic first with Kirsti Lindberg-Repo, previously at Hanken and now a successful consultant in brand management, and lately with Åke Finne, lecturer at Hanken. With Kirsti, we tried to broaden the scope of IMC beyond its concern with conventional communication media and to also include long-term developments in the IMC model.
With Åke, we went further and attempted to switch the focus from the sender to the user as a driver of communication. In the first 2017 issue of the European Journal of Marketing, based on an earlier study of relationship communication, Åke and I published a customer-driven integrated marketing communication (CIMC) model, where one central issue is which of all incoming messages become communication-in-use for the consumer and what value it has for his or her decision-making. IMC is geared toward integrating all of a firm’s media messages, albeit basically from a sender perspective. Don Schultz, Tom Duncan, and Sandra Moriarty, who have all visited Hanken and spoken to our students, have argued that, from a consumer perspective, communication is a much wider field than that. However, little of this has been integrated into IMC. We want to reverse the perspective toward customer-driven marketing communication and include the whole spectrum of sources of communication messages. The ongoing developments toward a digitalised world enables the use of such a communication model in practice.
Christian Teaching, Source: Mikael Albrecht; used with permission
Disseminating thoughts and findings
Writing books and articles
I have always wanted to communicate my viewpoints and research findings to both academics and practitioners. Even when I was working on my doctoral thesis I was writing articles on various aspects of service marketing and published them in magazines in Sweden and Finland intended mostly for practitioners. During the period from 1976 to 1980, I published 10 such articles in Sweden and a few in Finland. In 1983, I collected six of them together with four case examples in a book in Swedish (“Marketing for service firms” in English). Twice I have revised the book adding two new chapters, the second time in 1993. This book is still bought by both students and practitioners. It has also been translated into Finnish and two other Scandinavian languages.
In the late 1980s, Benjamin Schneider, a professor of psychology with an interest in service, asked me to write a book on service marketing for the English-language market. For a development process in the public sector in Finland on a nationwide scale, introduced in the mid-1980s, I had developed a textbook on customer-focused service management in the public sector, published in 1986, for educational use in that process. Together with Caroline Monthelie, a friend and management consultant whom I had worked with in executive education programmes, we developed this book further, and Caroline added a set of major cases from the public sector in Sweden. It was published the following year in Sweden. I took the public sector material as a starting point and developed a book for more general use. In 1990, Lexington Books published Service Management and Marketing in the US. It was also translated into four other languages. With the subtitle “Managing the service profit logic”, this book is now in its fourth edition, published in 2015 by John Wiley UK. Over the years the book has been published in 10 languages, the most recent translation is into Japanese. It pleases me that this book seems to sell equally as well in the practitioner market as to students and researchers. It has also been widely cited.
Today’s promotional systems in academia do not encourage researchers to write books, which is a pity. Writing a book is a way of putting together one’s thoughts, combining them with other relevant research, and communicating this to a broad audience.
As I have already mentioned, I have also always written articles, in the beginning both scientific and for practitioners and lately mostly scientific articles. Many of them have been extensively cited. Since the early 1990s, when I first became aware of such statistics, I have been the most cited professor in the business administration fields in Finland. In 2013, most of my scientific publications were collected into eight volumes published by Sage in its Legend in Marketing series edited by Jagdish Sheth. The volume titles include Service Marketing, Service Management, Service Quality, Service Logic, Relationship Marketing, Marketing Theory, Internal Marketing, and Marketing Communication.
Speaking to academics and practitioners
Speaking to various audiences is as important as writing articles and books. In my view, it is difficult for a researcher to become known and to get one’s thoughts accepted unless he or she attends conferences and workshops and presents not only papers but also himself or herself. A researcher who stays in his or her office and communicates through articles alone remains anonymous. There is a risk that his or her thoughts, however interesting and important they are, receive less attention. I always tell doctoral students and younger faculty that they have to travel and attend conferences to introduce themselves and their research personally to the academic community. The position and network I developed in this way has taken me as visiting scholar and speaker to the US, New Zealand, Australia, China, Thailand, Singapore, Brazil, South Africa, and a whole host of European countries, the most recent being Scotland, where in the autumn of 2016 I was invited to speak at an inaugurating conference of a newly established cross-disciplinary research centre of service excellence at the University of Edinburgh Business School. This institute, initiated by Stephen Osborne, a professor in public management, combines service management and public management in an interesting way.
Sometimes my scientific network has also offered overwhelming speaking venues, particularly in Italy. For example, Cristina Mele, an associate professor at the University of Naples “Federico II”, took me to a renaissance monastery church, and Roberta Sebastiani, an associate professor at the Catholic University “del Sacro Cuore” in Milan, to a Roman ruin deep under the current surface, to speak to business executives and students, respectively. For more than a decade I also taught a two-week evening course on service marketing in an executive Master’s in Marketing programme at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand, almost annually. Pedagogically, that was an enlightening learning experience. The salary paid for two-week stays on the executive floor of Bangkok’s best hotels by the river Chao Praya. Thammasat was also located by the river, so I took the regular boat service to the university. Those trips were quite an experience. The boats were old and often full. Embarking and disembarking was always an adventure. This was an evening course, so the days could be used to explore the wonders of Bangkok or just spend time by the hotel pool. During extended weekends between the two course weeks, my then wife Suvi, who sadly passed away in a fatal decease, and I had the opportunity to make trips in the region, visiting Vietnam, Brunei, Nepal, and several places in Thailand.
Teaching service marketing and management
Since 1981 I have been fortunate to be able to teach what I am passionate about and what I have studied throughout my academic career. That year my suggestion to introduce a master’s level elective course on service marketing and management was accepted at Hanken. This course has been taught every year since, some years twice. In 2017, it is in its 37th year. To the best of my knowledge, it is the longest-running service course in any academic institution globally. Its name, language of teaching, and pedagogical approach has changed over the years, and its content has, of course, developed based on new research. For a period I also taught a separate relationship marketing course.
In 1988, I spent a semester as a visiting professor at Arizona State University, formally invited by Bruce Walker, dean of the business school, and by Stephen Brown and Larry Crosby from its service research centre. Since then I have considered Phoenix my second home. I have been back several times as a visiting scholar, speaking at conferences as well as just as a tourist. For my pedagogical approach, the course on service marketing I taught there in 1988 was ground-breaking. At that time, teaching in Finnish business schools was still very lecturing-oriented. At ASU I learnt how to create an interactive environment in the classroom, especially on the graduate and MBA level. When I returned to Hanken, I completely turned around my service course. At first I had no lectures, but then students asked me to do a few at least. I also added student lecturing. A student team begins the classroom sessions with a short lecture based on a given book chapter or article. Then the students discuss the content and message of this chapter with me, and, when appropriate, I make some concluding remarks. In my view, this works very well. Now digitalisation has come to university education. For the time being I am filming a set of short video lectures on service management principles, which also will be publicly available.
During my stay at ASU I also attended a workshop in New Orleans on the interface between marketing and organisational behaviour, which resulted in an article, “Relationship approach to marketing in service contexts: the marketing and organizational behaviour interface”, published in the Journal of Business Research in 1990. This is still one of the most cited articles of that journal.
CERS (Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management)
The first twelve years of my interest in the service field at Hanken I was alone. In 1988, when I was a visiting professor at ASU, Veronica Liljander and Tore Strandvik, both now professors at Hanken, decided to challenge my service quality model. When I returned to Hanken, they had been convinced that it worked. Now we were four service-focused persons. My friend Lars, who had suggested that I study service marketing and who became a professor at Hanken’s Vasa campus on the West coast, had also taken an interest in the field. Ten years later we were about 20, doctoral candidates included. At ASU I had gotten acquainted with the business school’s service research centre, First Interstate Center for Services Marketing, now Center for Services Leadership, initiated by Stephen Brown, its first long-standing director, and now led by Mary Jo Bitner. In Sweden, CTF (Centre for Service Research) had been established at Karlstad University at the initiative of Bo Edvardsson and Evert Gummesson. I am honoured to have been acknowledged as distinguished international faculty and international research fellow, respectively, at these institutions.
As department chair, a position I held for altogether 13 years, I assembled a faculty meeting, including doctoral students, outside Vasa in December 1992 to discuss future research priorities. There we decided to direct our research toward the service and relationship marketing field. Having two or three priorities was also discussed, but as pointed out by Tore, a comparatively small faculty does not have the capacity to spread its resources. If we wanted to be successful, we had to choose one priority. The next step was to persuade Hanken to establish a research institute for service and relationship marketing research. It took two years to make the business school leadership ready to do that. However, at the time the law regulating universities in Finland did not recognise independent institutes outside regular departments. In spite of this, the rector, Marianne Stenius, a professor of finance, had the foresight to suggest that a research institute be formally established, although for the time being it could exist virtually only. The board accepted. In 1994 CERS (Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management) was established. Later, following a law change, it got a formal status. The first 16 years I served as chair of its board. In 2010, Kristina Heinonen, also a professor of service and relationship marketing, took over.
The establishment of CERS had a significant impact as an umbrella for our research. The number of doctoral candidates grew quickly, and it reinforced the international recognition of our research. By now, 59 doctoral degrees within the service and relationship field have been awarded at Hanken. The establishment of CERS also enabled a formalized network with firms interested in the field. Now, this network has been merged with the business school’s overall enterprise network. For CERS’s 20th anniversary in 2014, a collection of articles and research reports featuring research within the Nordic school tradition was assembled and was published in 2015 as a digital anthology: The Nordic School: Service Marketing and Management for the Future, edited by Johanna Gummerus and Catharina von Koskull, now at Vaasa University.
Administrative academic assignments
I have constantly tried to avoid what I have considered unproductive administrative assignments in academia. Once I was suggested as new rector of Hanken. I managed to escape. I was department chair two times, altogether 13 years, and for 16 years I chaired our research institute, CERS. For some years I was at the same time director of the centre. I have also served as a member of Hanken’s board, and of the board of the Hanken Foundation. For over 20 years I was a member of the Academic Council of the business school, which is the body overseeing and governing academic and educational activities. My final major task was to chair the University Council, which selects board members and oversees the work of the board. I considered these important tasks.
I have not been able to avoid all minor committees. The most important and memorable was a committee tasked with creating a rigorous system controlling the time used by faculty members. Robert Wendelin, then director of CERS who later left Hanken for a career in business, and I managed to fight off such attempts and succeeded in diluting the original plans by the business school administration. The resulting system does not disturb the work of professors and other faculty. That was a committee challenge worthwhile undertaking.
In 1984, as I was a newly appointed full professor, the students approached me and asked me to become the “Inspector” of the student union at Hanken. The role of the Inspector is to form a kind of a bridge between the student union and the business school and, as an experienced person, oversee the student union’s decision-making process. For some years the students had not accepted any of the professors for the position as their inspector, and a Hanken alumnus had assumed that role temporarily. Being asked was a great honour. I accepted, and served as Inspector for seven years. These years included many fun and memorable moments as well as a few occasions where I asked the governing bodies of the student union to reconsider a suggested action.
Outside Hanken, I was member of the board of The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters (Societas Scientiarum Fennica) for two periods and for 20 years a member of the board of Niord, the association of alumni from Swedish-language business schools in Finland. An external position I still have is Hanken’s representative in the Finnish Union of University Professors. Non-academic external assignments include a number of memberships in company boards.
Closing comments
It has been fascinating to look back at my career in academia. As others doing it have observed before (e.g., Lazer, 2013), reflecting on one’s career is like opening up the door from which a flood of memories and recollections of incidents pours out. The more you think about the past, the more memories surface. It is like “the completion of a jigsaw puzzle except there is no picture to illustrate the solution” (Savitt, 2011, p. 487). Fate has intervened not only once but many times, and my career has been pushed in a favourable direction. Several times I have been at the right place at the right time. Becoming interested in service marketing in the first place was a result of a sequence of lucky circumstances and events, none of them planned. Getting involved in service marketing at a very early stage, as one of the first, and the first in my home country, was a great advantage and earned me recognition very early. Likewise, getting involved with the international development of the field from its pioneering phase made it much easier to become internationally known.
Christian Grönroos and wife Viveca Ramstedt at honorary doctorate ceremony, 2016. Source: Markku Koivumäki; used with permission
The international network that developed during the years has taken me almost all around the world. I have already mentioned how I was invited as a visiting professor to ASU. At a conference in Toronto in 1988 I met Chen Bingfu and Han Jinglun, professors at Nankai University in Tianjin, China, who both were interested in the service sector. They invited me to Nankai. I was scheduled to visit there in early June 1989. A few days before I was about to leave for China, Han sent me a message saying, “We suggest that you postpone your trip due to difficulties to arrange lectures”. However, later during the 1990s I visited Nankai several times. At that time the interest in the service sector and service management was growing in China. Han Jinlung visited Finland several times and lectured at Hanken. I became an honorary professor in the management department at Nankai. In Tianjin I met Wei Fuxiang, a professor at Tianjin Normal University, which honoured me with a similar position. At Nankai I also met Fan Xiucheng, then a doctoral student, who later became a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai and took the initiative to start a service research centre there. I visited him and his family in Shanghai, and both Fan and Wei have visited Hanken. Göran Svensson, a professor at the Oslo School of Management, invited me to become an honorary professor in this Norwegian institution. In May 2016 the Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland conferred an honorary doctoral degree on me. In the autumn of 2016 the Finnish Service Alliance, a community of enterprises as well as business schools in Finland, honoured me with an award recognising my work as a supervisor of doctoral students studying topics in the field of service. Over the years I have supervised 27 doctoral theses and around 250 master’s thesis, most of them about service-related topics.
I have had the opportunity to visit many business schools and universities. In addition to ASU, I have made longer scholarly visits to Stanford University as guest scholar in the SCANCOR programme maintained by business schools in Scandinavia, The University of Auckland in New Zealand, and Lund University in Sweden. At service and relationship marketing conferences, I met Rod Brodie, a professor at the University of Auckland Business School, who twice took me to New Zealand as a visiting scholar. My former doctoral student Kaj Storbacka, who to the best of my knowledge introduced to term customer relationship management, or CRM, left a successful consultancy career in the service and relationship management field to become a professor in Auckland. Discussions with them, professionally and also socially, for example cruising in the archipelago where my wife Viveca and I have our holiday cottage, have always been rewarding and fun. Rod has spoken at Hanken both to students and our business partners. Viveca and I have visited Rod’s and his wife Margaret’s home in Auckland and had dinner in their beautiful garden. In Auckland, I also met many of Rod’s colleagues, among them Richard Brookes, who invited Viveca and me to his and his family’s home for Christmas dinner. For us, who were used to celebrating Christmas in cold and snowy weather, having Christmas dinner in the garden dressed in shorts and short-sleeves was quite an experience, fantastic and rather awkward, but fun.
Around the turn of the millennium, Lund University established a service management master’s and subsequently also a doctoral programme in Helsingborg, which is rather unique globally. Jan Persson, a senior lecturer there, took the initiative to invite me as a guest professor on a part-time basis. I held this position for seven years, from 2001 to 2007. When Jan a decade earlier defended his doctoral thesis, I was the official opponent.
The fact that I have in many capacities been involved in the service and relationship marketing fields from its pioneering stage has also earned me many recognitions, for which I am very honoured. For example, surprisingly early in my career, in 1986, I was selected member of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters (Societas Scientiarum Fennica). In the 2000s, I served on the board of the Society, and I am still a member of its financial advisory board. At its 175th anniversary in 2014, the Society awarded me its highest recognition of scientific achievements, The Nyström Prize. In 1997, the Hanken School of Economics recognised my “scientific achievements and contributions to the business school” with its medal in silver as well as the Finnish Association for Business Administration with its Hugo Pipping Medal. In 1999, I was recognised with the AMA Service Marketing Group’s Career Contribution to Service Disciplines Award. In the 1980s, I was awarded the Scandinavian recognitions The Ahlsell Prize for my research into marketing and Erik Kempe’s Prize for my textbooks on service marketing. In 2011, as the first professor from outside North America, I was selected Legend in Marketing by the Sheth Foundation. When I stepped down as chair of the board of our CERS research centre in 2010, my colleagues recognised my efforts by instituting the Grönroos Service Research Award to acknowledge innovative research in the spirit of the Nordic school, “challenging common understanding and demonstrating significant originality”. The department chair, Maria Holmlund, announced this award in a most memorable way. I did not know anything about this beforehand. All these and other recognitions, for example being selected teacher of the year by the students and honorary member of the student union as well as being honoured by The Finnish Business School Graduates community and decorated by the president of Finland for my scientific achievements, make me both humble and very proud of what I have achieved through my research and other efforts.
To finish this autobiography, I want to mention a final recognition, which has made me extremely proud, and humble. When I formally resigned from my position as professor in 2014 and accepted an emeritus researcher contract, Hanken’s board decided to make my former position a chair called Grönroos Professor of Marketing. In 2015, Jaakko Aspara, at a comparatively young age already a highly merited researcher, became the first Grönroos professor.
About the author
Christian Grönroos, Professor Emeritus of service and relationship marketing at Hanken School of Economics has published eight books and more than 150 articles and book chapters in several languages on service marketing and management, relationship marketing, service quality, marketing theory, marketing communication, and other topics. Many of them have been widely cited. He is a distinguished member of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters (Societas Scientiarum Fennica) and has been selected Legend in Marketing.
References
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[i] A note on language is probably in order. I am Finnish but a Swedish-speaking Finn. Finnish is my second language. For 600 years until 1809 Sweden and Finland were one country. Stockholm was the capital, but a large number of persons from the Finnish part of the country had a substantial impact on political, cultural, academic, and military life in the kingdom. Because of these ties, Finland is still a bilingual country with two official languages. Somewhat less than six per cent of the population in Finland speaks Swedish as their mother tongue. There is an educational system in both Finnish and Swedish, from kindergarten to university level. Hanken School of Economics teaches in Swedish, and particularly in the 1970s doctoral theses were written in Swedish. Today, to facilitate international student exchange, Hanken also offers programmes with courses in English.
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