Aksoy, Buoye paper honored by service management journal
Faculty | Mar 10, 2016 | Gabelli School of Business
For the third year in a row, Associate Dean Lerzan Aksoy has been the author of the outstanding paper of the year in the Journal of Service Management.
This year’s paper, titled Perceptions are relative: An examination of the relationship between relative satisfaction metrics and share of wallet, is the “scientific companion piece” to Aksoy’s New York Times bestselling book, The Wallet Allocation Rule, said Assistant Professor Alexander Buoye, a coauthor of both the paper and the book.
The paper posits that there are “weak relationships between satisfaction and share of wallet in literature” and “challenges by managers as to whether satisfaction is a useful predictor of customer behavior and business outcomes.”
The research, he added, sought to find the best model for predicting the relationship between satisfaction measures and share of wallet.
In addition to Buoye, other coauthors are Timothy Lee Keiningham, chief strategy and client officer at Rockbridge Associates; Bruce Cooil, Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University; Edward C. Malthouse, Department of Integrated Marketing Communication at Northwestern University; Arne De Keyser, assistant professor of marketing at EDHEC Business School; and Bart Lariviére, Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Ghent University.
The paper has practical implications for managers who are seeking to determine the link between customer satisfaction and share of wallet, arguing that firms need to focus on ranking with similar firms, rather than simply satisfaction scores themselves.
“If the firm already has a customer-satisfaction tracking program in place, managers can simply add questions about competitors used and ask respondents to provide satisfaction ratings for these competitors in addition to the focal firm,” the paper reads.
The Journal of Service Management is considered a top journal in the service marketing research area, Buoye said.
“It’s an important paper for us, because it’s speaking to the right audience,” he said.