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John C.Groth: John C. Groth is at the Department of Finance, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas, USA.
Richard T. Dye: Richard T. Dye is at the Department of Finance, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas, USA.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: We acknowledge the assistance and helpful comments of anonymous referees as well as the insightful comments and assistance of J. Peters and A. Roberts.
Introduction
Marketing and delivering services and providing for service quality are important in creating value for customers and in turn, for generating value to the service provider. Success in getting the customer to realize and recognize the value of the services and service quality is a challenge for the marketing professional.
Effective marketing establishes a relationship between the customer and the provider. This customer-provider service relationship has an important role in identifying a customer's perceived needs relative to the service offer. On another occasion, we will address the important area of customer-provider relationships in the marketing of services[1]. The nature and efficiency of this relationship will influence the risk of sale of a service, customer perception of quality of delivery and value realization, customer satisfaction, the perception of future sales of service, and future choice decisions for service. The effective marketer of services provides the opportunity for and delicately manages important relationships in the customer-provider space.
We begin with background information that will support discussions. Next, attention centers on relationships of great importance in creating value in services provided as perceived by the customer. The approach taken offers a multi-dimensional space model useful in characterizing, depicting, and examining factors affecting perceived value of a service, expectations, shortfalls, and bonus realization. Then, we illustrate and discuss important issues related to these relationships. The paper closes with a summary of important guidelines significant in the marketing and delivery of services.
Background
Literature: service versus product characteristics and related issues
The literature offers many valuable contributions related to service and to quality. The references offer a minute sampling of the many important works. For reader efficiency, we limit citations in the text to those contributions particularly germane to the discussion.
Brown, et al. (1994) report on a biographical analysis of over a thousand contributions related to service marketing. Mitchell (1999) offers an...