Guest article by Charles Hofacker
It is really a privilege for me to have been asked to peck out some words at the old keyboard for SERVSIG. The honor is especially great given that services marketing folk are known far and wide as a coherent, well-established, active and impactful intellectual community within the larger field of marketing.
Perhaps there is some irony to someone asking me for these words. I started out my career doing CPG modeling. Whatever else we might say about consumer package goods, they pretty clearly fall into the tangible goods category. However, before the Ph.D. I had a job as a junior assistant computer programmer, which certainly counts as a service. Plus I put myself through my Ph.D. working the user services help desk at UCLA. So yeah, I punched a few punch cards doing service.
Of course, being at Florida State meant I was liable to end up with a services world view by osmosis. How much resistance to services could I offer with colleagues like Joe Cronin, Mike Brady, Martin Mende, Colleen Harmeling, and many students like Alexis Allen, Tom Baker, Stacy Robinson, and Clay Vorhees, among others? One could argue that even a modest yearly osmosis rate meant I would end up being services-oriented sooner or later.
As it happened, it occurred somewhere in the interim between sooner and later. One day Roland Rust put me on the ERB of JSR. He must have seen the inner service scholar in me that I had not particularly recognized in myself. The next thing I knew I was getting really interesting manuscripts to read. It taught me to pay attention to the service literature and to think a little differently about myself.
On another fateful day, I was reading Services Marketing by Zeithaml, Bitner, and Gremler. I am not really sure why I was reading that book, although I am susceptible to reading the occasional random textbook. But back to my story. At a certain point I ran into this quote, “An interesting way to look at the influence of technology is to realize that the Internet is just ‘one big service’” (Zeithaml, Bitner & Gremler 2006, p. 18). I could hardly disagree with that and I suppose it sealed my fate.
Just to circle this story back to my programmer days, in 2019 more and more economic value is created, delivered and consumed with software. I recommend that service scholars think seriously about the role of software in service systems. Managing software is not like managing people, nor should we assume that consumers will always perceive software entities like service employees.
By definition, software is inventoried service. If that is so, service scholars should be at the forefront of studying it, just as we study service where delivery is executed by humans. I don’t think we should leave software to the engineers or our colleagues in MIS. I give my opinion on software marketing in the most recent Review of Marketing Research (Hofacker 2019).
Of course software figures at the back end of service marketing management as well. All of the most interesting trends in marketing analytics and CRM are being driven by software. Computers that learn and end up sufficiently intelligent to help us do marketing do so because they are animated with software. We may call it machine learning but in reality it is software doing the learning. I am currently especially interested in generative adversarial networks and reinforcement learning.
I will close this note with a previously unknown episode from the history of SERVSIG. While Ray Fisk’s role has generally been well-documented, you might not know that Ray employed me as a clandestine agent to help reduce the resistance to SERVSIG becoming a SIG. My specific job was to knock Tangible Goods SIG (GOODSIG) out of AMA. This I did by arguing before the Academic Council that bananas were more perishable than a haircut, at least if it was a decent haircut. I mean not like a bowl over your head type of cut or something. Fortunately, actual support for GOODSIG turned out to be perishable, and the rest is history.
Charles Hofacker
Carl DeSantis Professor of Business Administration and
Professor of Marketing
at the College of Business, Florida State University.
References
– Hofacker, Charles F. (2019), “The Growing Importance of Software as a Driver of Value Exchange,” Review of Marketing Research, 16, 85-95.
– Zeithaml, Valarie A., Mary Jo Bitner, and Dwayne D. Gremler (2006), Services Marketing (Fourth ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
