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The implications of "Big M" marketing for modeling service and relationships.

Article Excerpt
Rust and Chung (2006) provide an excellent integration and assessment of current models of service and relationships, as well as a thought-provoking agenda for future research. In this brief essay, I identify some challenges, opportunities, and priorities for improving models of service and relationships.

Rust and Chung (2006) integrate two distinctive streams of research--models of service and relationships--that are rapidly converging. This convergence is noteworthy because it reflects a shift in the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline, as exemplified by the new definition of marketing recently adopted by the American Marketing Association:

Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

I read Rust and Chung's (2006) manuscript shortly after the Journal of Marketing's special section on customer relationship management (CRM) went to press. In their introduction to the special section, Boulding et al. (2005, p. 156) argue that "CRM is the outcome of the continuing evolution and integration of marketing ideas and newly available data, technologies and organizational forms." They observe that a common definition of CRM is emerging, articulated by Payne and Frow (2005, p. 168) as follows:

CRM is a strategic approach concerned with creating improved shareholder value through the development of appropriate relationships with key customers and customer segments. CRM unites the potential of relationship marketing strategies and [information technology] to create profitable, long-term relationships with customers and other key stakeholders. CRM provides enhanced opportunities to use data and information to both understand customers and co-create value with them. This requires a cross-functional integration of processes, people, operations and marketing capabilities that is enabled through information, technology and applications.

Payne and Frow's definition suggests that models of service and relationships have the potential to play a central role in marketing science and practice. However, Hunt (2004, p. 22) offers a prescient warning about the recent shift toward a "service-dominant" logic in marketing:

The emerging dominant logic has many implications, but not entirely what...

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