Announcements

Professor P.K. Kannan, Distinguished Faculty Fellow of the CES, and Professor Sunil Mithas, CES Director of Research, were featured speakers at the annual Smith School Emerging Markets Forum, on April 29, 2016. This event was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. Professor Kannan's talk, titled "U.S.- India Startup Connect: the Marketing Analytics Opportunity," focused on how Indians educated in U.S. business schools, who return home to launch start-ups, might use marketing analytics to secure success. Professor Mithas's talk, "Dancing Elephants and Leaping Jaguars: How to Excel, Innovate, and Transform your Organization the Tata Way," was based on his recently published book of the same name. The focus was Tata's framework to help organizations rediscover their potential and charge ahead using the levers of business excellence and innovation.

National Technology Readiness Survey Results Featured in Harvard Business Review
The results of the latest National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS), which shows the on-demand economy continuing to flourish, were featured in the April 14, 2016 Harvard Business Review.

Wagner Moderates SMPS Panel on Leadership Challenges in the Public vs. the Private Sector

On January 30, the monthly leadership luncheon of the SMPS New York City chapter sponsored a lively and engaging panel discussion on leadership challenges presented by managing in the public vs. the private sector. The distinguished panelists included John Boule II, senior vice president of Dewberry, NYC, former commander of the NY District of USCOE; Sue Baer, global aviation planning leader of Arup, former director of aviation at the Port Authority; and Mysore Nagaraja, chairman and co-founder of Spartan Solutions, LLC, and former president of MTA Capital Construction. Topics of discussion included leadership style, differences in leading public vs. private sector employees, and challenges facing leaders of engineering firms in the next 5-10 years. The panel was moderated by Janet Wagner, director of the Center for Excellence in Service.

The Center for Excellence in Service Graduates Cohort 5 of SMPS U

The CES was delighted to graduate Cohort 5 of SMPS University to campus on October 14, 2015, with an evening reception at the Marriott Inn & Conference Center. The Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) is a national membership group of marketing professionals in the architecture, engineering, and construction fields. Twenty-two of its members are attending the two-session program. The first session is being held October 15-16 at the Smith School of Business in College Park, MD. The second session will be held November 12-13, 2015, at the Smith School facility in Washington, DC. In the first session, the marketing professionals participated in modules on service marketing strategy, financial analysis, and survey research methods, taught by Smith School professors Janet Wagner, Michael Faulkender, and Joydeep Srivastava. In the second session, modules on new service development, the customer experience, and leadership, will be taught by professors P.K. Kannan, Gaurav Bhalla, and Neta Moye. Between sessions, participants will work on team-based action learning projects (ALPs), that address marketing challenges facing their firms. Tim Klabunde, Director of Marketing at Timmons Group, was a featured dinner speaker during the first session, and Virginia Sertich, Director of Area Marketing at Gensler will be a featured luncheon speakers in the second session. The program will include a celebratory dinner at Woodward Table, Washington DC, sponsored by SMPS. Each participant will receive a certificate of completion. This program is approved for 25 hours of Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) continuing education units and American Institute of Architects learning units.

European Marketing Academy Honors Roland Rust

Roland Rust, active with research and academic institutions in England and the Netherlands, is one of two people this year to be elected a Fellow of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC). Rust, Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, was also recently named as an inaugural American Marketing Association Fellow.

He is one of only two Americans to be an EMAC Fellow.

Rust's appointment recognizes his outstanding contributions to both the EMAC community and the scholarship and practice of marketing by European academies.

Rust serves as Visiting Chair in Marketing Research at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and International Research Fellow of Oxford University's Center for Corporate Reputation. He also currently serves as Vice-President of External Relations for EMAC, the only non-European on the EMAC Steering Committee.

He also is founder and executive director of two research centers at the Smith School: the Center for Excellence in Service and Center for Complexity in Business.

Marketing Association Honors Smith Professor

The American Marketing Association has selected Professor Roland Rust at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business as an inaugural AMA Fellow in a new program that honors top marketing academics.

The AMA, the largest marketing association in North America, selected Rust because of his contributions in teaching, research, practice, service and leadership.

Rust, a Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair, is founder and executive director of two research centers at the Smith School: The Center for Excellence in Service and the Center for Complexity in Business. In 1992 he founded the annual Frontiers in Service Conference, sponsored by INFORMS and respected widely as a leading global conference on service research.

Rust's global activity extends to serving as an International Research Fellow of Oxford University's Center for Corporate Reputation and as visiting chair in marketing science at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Other lifetime achievement honors include the AMA Irwin McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award, Fellow of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, the Paul D. Converse Award, AMA's Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award, AMA's Churchill Award for Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research, and the Distinguished Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science.

The award will be presented at the AMA Winter Educators Conference on Feb. 14, 2015, in San Antonio, Texas. The association will induct up to three AMA fellows annually.

Roland Rust is New Editor of International Journal of Research in Marketing

The CES is proud to announce that Roland Rust, Executive Director of the center, has been named editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

The International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) is an international, double-blind peer-reviewed journal for marketing academics and practitioners. Building on a great tradition of global marketing scholarship, IRJM aims to contribute in a meaningful way to the field of marketing research by providing a high-quality medium for the dissemination of the new marketing knowledge and methods. Among IJRM's targeted audience are marketing scholars, practitioners (e.g., marketing research and consulting professionals) another interested groups and individuals.

Professor Rust was founder and first editor of the Journal of Service Research. He is also former editor of the Journal of Marketing.

For more information on IJRM, please click here.

Janet Wagner Moderates U.S. Department of Labor Customer Service Panel

Janet Wagner, Director of the CES, moderated a panel on customer service feedback for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), on September 25, 2014. Professor Wagner launched the discussion with a brief presentation on the importance of managing customer feedback well, and how customer feedback can be used to improve customer service quality. The panel featured Tina Jones of OSHA, and Doug Robins and Danielle Germaine of the OASAM. Panelists presented best practices in customer service from their offices, and fielded questions from DOL staff located onsite and offsite. The panel was offered as part of the DOL's customer service community of practice program.

Roland Rust Publishes The Handbook of Service Marketing Research

Roland Rust, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Service, has just published The Handbook of Service Marketing Research. This volume brings together an all-star team of leading researchers in service marketing to explore many of the hottest topics in service marketing today. Cutting-edge topics include: customer relationships and loyalty, customer-centered metrics, managing customer contacts, product and pricing, digital service marketing, rethinking the marketing function, and service for society. This book, which includes authors from both academia and industry, will provide academics with an invaluable current view of the field and practitioners with a window into the latest academic thinking. With chapters from internationally renowned contributors, this comprehensive yet concise handbook will appeal to service marketing academics, researchers and service practitioners. Professor Rust's co-author is Professor Ming-hui Huang of National Taiwan University, who is a research fellow of the CES.

The University of Tampere EMBAs Visit the Smith School

The University of Tampere in Finland partnered with the Center for Excellence in Service (CES) to offer an executive education program focusing on service marketing and management. The CES hosted 17 EMBA students from the Finnish university from May 14-16, 2014. Professors P.K. Kannan and Yogesh Joshi presented, respectively, seminars on customer equity management and service innovation. Our Finnish guests were hosted onsite by managers at the Corporate Executive Board, in Arlington, VA., for a seminar on the "effortless" customer experience, and by marketing managers at The National Aquarium in Baltimore, to learn about its innovative marketing program. Onsite visits incorporated themes discussed in the program to provide students the opportunity to learn from leading marketing practitioners.

The CES Hosts Social Media Panel at the Smith School Business Summit

The Center for Excellence in Service (CES) held a successful panel on social media at the third annual Smith School Business Summit (SSBS) on March 28, at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The CES invited four panelists working as social media managers or consultants to discuss the challenges and rewards of using social media to provide customer support and build customer relationships. The panel was moderated by Associate Professor & Director of the CES, Janet Wagner and included four panelists: Alphonse MacDonald, Director of Marketing and Technology of The National Academies; Lucia Stoller, Director of Social Marketing at Marriott International; Brian Lustig, Partner at Bluetext; and Jonathan Rick, Digital & Social Media Marketing Consultant of The Jonathan Rick Group.

The panel began with a brief introduction of the panelists followed by questions from the moderator and members of the audience. Topics of discussion included strategies for identifying social media platforms and metrics for success, tips for monitoring and managing customer feedback, and the role of social media in a company's marketing communications program. Panelists also discussed how to successfully pitch a social media plan to senior executives by identifying the right metrics to increase the return on investment (ROI). Strategies on how to utilize social media to engage with customers and strengthen customer relationships, tips to successfully manage social media platforms during an internal or external crisis, as well as how to find the right balance between social media and sales platforms were also shared.

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