Valarie Zeithaml

Last updated
Valarie Zeithaml
TitleDavid S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing
Academic work
Discipline Marketing
Sub-discipline Services marketing,
Service quality
Institutions UNC Kenan–Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Notable worksDriving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy

Valarie A. Zeithaml is a marketing professor and author. She is the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zeithaml is an expert in the area of services marketing and service quality. In the 1980s Zeithaml and her co-authors developed SERVQUAL, a quality management framework for services. She was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in the report on "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds." [1]

Contents

Selected publications

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Services marketing</span> Branch of marketing specialised in services

Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing which emerged as a separate field of study in the early 1980s, following the recognition that the unique characteristics of services required different strategies compared with the marketing of physical goods.

The loyalty business model is a business model used in strategic management in which company resources are employed so as to increase the loyalty of customers and other stakeholders in the expectation that corporate objectives will be met or surpassed. A typical example of this type of model is: quality of product or service leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty, which leads to profitability.

SERVQUAL is a multi-dimensional research instrument designed to capture consumer expectations and perceptions of a service along five dimensions that are believed to represent service quality. SERVQUAL is built on the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm, which, in simple terms, means that service quality is understood as the extent to which consumers' pre-consumption expectations of quality are confirmed or disconfirmed by their actual perceptions of the service experience. When the SERVQUAL questionnaire was first published in 1985 by a team of academic researchers, A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry to measure quality in the service sector, it represented a breakthrough in the measurement methods used for service quality research. The diagnostic value of the instrument is supported by the model of service quality which forms the conceptual framework for the development of the scale. The instrument has been widely applied in a variety of contexts and cultural settings and found to be relatively robust. It has become the dominant measurement scale in the area of service quality. In spite of the long-standing interest in SERVQUAL and its myriad of context-specific applications, it has attracted some criticism from researchers.

Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals." Enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering customer loyalty are pivotal for businesses, given the significant importance of improving the balance between customer attitudes before and after the consumption process.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:

Inseparability is a term used in marketing to describe a key quality of services as distinct from goods, namely the characteristic that a service has which renders it impossible to divorce the supply or production of the service from its consumption. Other key characteristics of services include perishability, intangibility and variability.

Customer retention refers to the ability of a company or product to retain its customers over some specified period. High customer retention means customers of the product or business tend to return to, continue to buy or in some other way not defect to another product or business, or to non-use entirely. Selling organizations generally attempt to reduce customer defections. Customer retention starts with the first contact an organization has with a customer and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship and successful retention efforts take this entire lifecycle into account. A company's ability to attract and retain new customers is related not only to its product or services, but also to the way it services its existing customers, the value the customers actually perceive as a result of utilizing the solutions, and the reputation it creates within and across the marketplace.

Intangibility refers to the lack of palpable or tactile property making it difficult to assess service quality. According to Zeithaml et al., “Because services are performances, rather than objects, they cannot be seen, felt, tasted, or touched in the same manner in which goods can be sensed.” As a result, intangibility has historically been seen as the most important distinction between services and products in the literature on services marketing. Other key characteristics of services include perishability, inseparability and variability.

Service quality (SQ), in its contemporary conceptualisation, is a comparison of perceived expectations (E) of a service with perceived performance (P), giving rise to the equation SQ = P − E. This conceptualistion of service quality has its origins in the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm.

<i>Journal of Service Research</i> Academic journal

The Journal of Service Research is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the field of business studies. The current editor-in-chief is Ming-Hui Huang. The journal was established by Roland Rust in 1998 and is published by SAGE Publications. The Journal of Service Research is sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Venkatesh Shankar</span>

Venkatesh (Venky) Shankar is an American marketing professor, consultant and author. He is currently Professor of Marketing, Ford Chair in Marketing & E-Commerce at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University. He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Marketing Strategy and the author of Shopper Marketing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kristine Yaffe</span> American scholar

Kristine Yaffe is an American Cognitive decline and dementia researcher. She is the Scola Endowed Chair and Vice Chair and Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Epidemiology and the Director of the Center for Population Brain Health at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2019, Yaffe was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Leonard L. "Len" Berry is a University Distinguished Professor of Marketing of Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Berry is a past president of the American Marketing Association. He has studied service delivery in healthcare at the Mayo Clinic and in cancer care settings. Berry is Texas A&M's most cited faculty member on Google Scholar, with over 235,000 citations.

Judith Hoffman Hibbard is the senior researcher of the Health Policy Research Group at the University of Oregon. She is also the professor emerita of the university's Department of Planning, Public Policy, and Management. Her research mostly concerns topics such as health literacy and how consumers utilize health information, and patient activation.

Karen C. Johnson is the chair for the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC). She has been involved in at least five clinical world trials, including a Women's health initiative, the SPRINT Trial, the Look AHEADStudy, the TARGIT Study and the D2d Trial. She has been noted by Thomson Reuters as one of the world's most-cited scientists.

Richard Bagozzi is an American marketing theorist, consumer psychologist, and the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Behavioral Science in Management at Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He is one of the most cited scholars in Marketing and among the field's most prominent theorists and empirical researchers. He has been ranked among The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014 by Thomson Reuters. He is an inaugural fellow of the American Marketing Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. Parasuraman</span> American business professor

A. "Parsu" Parasuraman is an Indian-American marketing professor and author. He is the Professor and the James W. McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami.

Valarie is a given name, similar to Valerie.

Joan F. Brennecke is an American chemical engineer who is the Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Brennecke develops supercritical fluids, ionic liquids and novel spectroscopic methods.

Karen Glanz is an American behavioral epidemiologist. She is the George A. Weiss University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Glanz is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and has been recognized as one of the world's most influential scientific minds.

References

  1. "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds | Thomson Reuters". thomsonreuters.com. Archived from the original on 2015-09-06. Retrieved 2015-08-29.