The Service Revolution and the Transformation of Marketing Science

Roland T. Rust () and Ming-Hui Huang ()
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Roland T. Rust: Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742
Ming-Hui Huang: Department of Information Management, College of Management, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan

Marketing Science, 2014, vol. 33, issue 2, 206-221

Abstract: The nature of marketing science is changing in a systematic, predictable, and irrevocable way. As information technology enables ubiquitous customer communication and big customer data, the fundamental nature of the firm's connection to the customer changes: better, more personalized service can be offered, from which service relationships are deepened, and consequently, more profitable customers grow the influence of service within the goods sector and expand the service sector in the economy. Marketing is becoming more personalized, and marketing science techniques that exploit customer heterogeneity are becoming more important. Information technology improvements also guarantee the increasing importance and usage of computationally intensive data processing and “big data.” Most importantly, these trends have already lasted for more than a century, and they will become even more pronounced in the coming years as a result of the monotonic nature of technology improvement. These changes imply a transformation of marketing science in both the topics to be emphasized and the methods to be employed. Increasingly, and inevitably, all of marketing will come to resemble to a greater degree the formerly specialized area of service marketing, only with an increased emphasis on marketing analytics.

Keywords: service; customer lifetime value; customer loyalty; customer relationship management; customization; information technology; service productivity; customer equity; big data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (90)

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