Introduction from co-guest editors

Introduction from co-guest editors

Introduction from co-guest editors

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Managing Service Quality, Volume 22, Issue 6.

This special issue is the amalgam of selected papers from the Third Biennial International Conference (BIC) on Services Marketing that was held in 7-9 September 2011 in İzmir, Turkey. The theme of Third BIC was “Servicing the way out of the economic downfall: exploring the present and future role of services”. The Conference were jointly organized in an excellent cooperation and collaboration with The Athens University of Economics & Business Department of Marketing & Communication, Greece; Faculty of Business of Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey and The Greek Marketing Academy, Greece. More than 200 participants from seven countries indicates that BIC is a very successful step to create a new international conferences chain.

The services sector is the dominant driving economic force worldwide and marketing and management practices in this field are evolving rapidly. As a result, there is an increasing academic and business interest in the services sector. Particularly so at a time of ambivalence in the aftermath of a severe economic crisis, which challenges established business models and practices, erodes customer confidence and buying power, and alters customer behaviour in many different ways. Academics and business practitioners are called upon to help companies come to terms with the new constantly changing conditions they confront with and align their business processes in ways that will enable them to adapt to the new economic reality. The conference aimed to discuss the ways through which services companies can achieve and sustain prosperity and growth in these turbulent times. The success, relevance and reliability of established models and practices were reassessed based on their resilience and performance in these conditions, while new processes and models were presented and their potential superiority were evaluated during the conference.

Since 2009, the BIC in Services Marketing is one of the official conferences of the Greek Marketing Academy, organized in Greece or abroad. The First BIC on Services Marketing was hosted by the University of Aegean, Chios island, Greece, in 27-29 September 2007 and the second was hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece, in 4-6 November 2009. These two conferences were jointly organized by the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the Greek Marketing Academy. The main theme of the first BIC on Services Marketing held in Chios was “Strategic developments in services marketing”. The theme of the second conference in Thessaloniki was “Orchestrating the service experience: music to the ears of our customers”. All three conferences provided the opportunity to exchange ideas on current developments in Services Marketing.

The presentation of double blind refereed research papers generated constructive exchange of ideas on international practices, leading to a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of services. Participants, nearly 200 for each conference, included not only educators and researchers, but also publishers and practitioners.

The idea to publish in a special issue of the Managing Service Quality Journal was an excellent opportunity to spread the discussions and knowledge accumulated from the Third BIC to the Service Marketing community all over the world.

After a careful evaluation process on all the papers presented at the Conference, we as co-guest editors, officially invited authors of selected manuscripts from different topics in services to submit their papers for review within the framework of the MSQ Publication Policy.

Papers covered by this special issue were selected after a final evaluation as best papers for publication. We especially thank MSQ editors for creating this opportunity and all the authors for their contribution to Third BIC and this special issue.

Finally, this special issue is dedicated to all academicians from Greece and Turkey for their contribution to the friendship between the people of the two countries.

Mustafa Tanyeri and Spiros Gounaris