guest article by Leonard Berry,
the Acceptance Remarks for 2018 American Marketing Association Willliam Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” Award
We are all familiar with marketing’s traditional framework of the 4 P’s: product, place, promotion, and price. I would like to briefly share with you the “3 P’s” that have helped me in my career. They are passion, perseverance, and proximity.
Passion
When I was a doctoral student in the late 1960’s, no professor ever uttered the words “services marketing.” The field did not exist and it did not occur to me until the 1970’s when I was learning about financial services that marketing a service requires different ideas than marketing a manufactured good. I was fascinated by the idea of marketing services and in 1980
published my first general services article titled “Services Marketing Is Different.” I knew then that services marketing would be the core of my life’s work. I had found my academic “reason for being” and in 1982 I found the perfect academic home at Texas A&M University for pursuing this work. Waiting for me at Texas A&M were my collaborators-to-be, Parsu Parasuraman and Valarie Zeithaml.
Valarie, Parsu, and I became services marketing soul mates. We connected with the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), which sponsored our program of research in service quality spanning 15 years.
But it wasn’t just the three of us in the early 1980’s who sensed the need to create a new sub-discipline of marketing focused on services. There was a core of people – about 15-20 of us from the U.S. and Europe, including some executives – who banded together to share ideas, convene conferences, write articles, and defend this fledgling new field against the pushback that “marketing was marketing.” Many of us met at the first-ever services marketing conference held in the United States which was sponsored by the AMA. I was so fortunate. I was in the right place at the right time with the right people; I was passionate about service research then – and still am 35 years later.
Perseverance
Passion alone is not enough, but passion coupled with perseverance is powerful. When I shifted my career focus to healthcare, perseverance played a major role. My career-long commitment to service research prepared me well for my sabbatical leave study at Mayo Clinic during the 2001-2002 academic year. I knew little about one of our most important services, healthcare, and it was time to learn.
At Mayo Clinic, I interviewed patients, physicians, nurses, allied health staff, and administrators, and observed numerous surgeries and doctor-patient interactions in examination and hospital rooms. I stayed in the hospital as a patient and flew on the emergency response helicopter.
I became hooked on healthcare during my time at Mayo Clinic. I was fascinated. I was learning about a service that was fundamentally different from the commercial services I had been studying for years. I felt that I could merge my life’s work in services marketing and quality with healthcare and eventually contribute to improving healthcare service quality.
My re-entry to Texas A&M from Mayo Clinic was a struggle that required perseverance. I wanted to “hurry up and do something,” but I didn’t know what to do or how to do it. The medical journals, the medical service literature, and the culture of medical publishing were unfamiliar territory. I felt like a rookie. I was frustrated and wondered if I was on a fool’s errand.
I persevered and eventually regained some self-confidence. I realized that to contribute to the medical literature, I had to do three things: 1) learn a lot more about healthcare; 2) fully exploit my knowledge of business, services marketing and quality; and 3) build a network of collaborators who had healthcare backgrounds.
In October 2003, about 1 ½ years after returning from Mayo Clinic, I co-authored my first medical journal article. Collaborating with a physician and Kathleen Seiders of Boston College, we published “Innovations in Access to Care: A Patient-Centered Approach” in Annals of Internal Medicine, a top-tier medical journal. It was a challenge but we did it and I knew then that I could do it again.
For the last 17 years I have been immersed in studying and writing about improving service quality in healthcare. During the last four years I’ve focused on service improvement in cancer care, work that has inspired me in a way words cannot capture.
Proximity
The third “P,” proximity, has long been a principle in my research. I recently heard a remarkable speech by Brian Stevenson, a law professor who founded the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson stressed the importance of being proximate to the poor to effectively advocate for them. “There is power in proximity,” he said. “We see things you can’t see from a distance.”
I, too, believe in the power of proximity and spend much of my research time in the field, to learn what I can’t learn from a distance. Being a field researcher means being away from family, friends, and the comforts of home and I recall one evening when I was away and feeling sorry for myself. It was a Friday night in 1990 and Parsu Parasuraman and I was in Rochester, New York. It was nearly 10:00 p.m. and we had just finished customer focus group interviews at Eastman Kodak for our service quality research program.
Parsu and I had an important conversation during our late-evening meal. I asked him: “Why are we here? Why aren’t we home with our families?” He looked across the table and said, “Len, we are here because the data are here.” I’ll never forget that conversation with Parsu. The data were in Rochester on that Friday and so were we.
My research in cancer care has included field research visits to 10 innovative cancer centers in the U.S., and, most recently, a one-week visit to the leading cancer hospital in Denmark.
Some of my best interviews have been with patients while they were in the chemo chair receiving treatment. They had time to talk to me and I could also interview family who often was present. Some of the oncologists and nurses I’ve interviewed have had cancer themselves. I always ask if having cancer changed the way they deliver care. The answer is always “yes.”
I need to be on the front lines of cancer care to really understand how to improve service and ease what is inherently a frightening, emotionally intense journey. Proximity enables me to learn what I could not otherwise learn. Proximity feeds my passion for service research and it propels the research.
In closing, the poet Tagore wrote: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
Leonard Berry
Regents Professor
University Distinguished Professor of Marketing
M.B. Zale Chair in Retailing and Marketing Leadership
Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence
Mays Business School
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
and
Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Cambridge, MA
