University of Passau team receives award for most important publication in the field of service marketing
Tracking down customers' inner feelings of disruption when it comes to product upgrades: a study led by marketing and innovation researchers from the University of Passau has won the 2024 SERSVIG Best Service Article Award from the American Marketing Association SERVSIG.
Seat heating is already installed in new cars; however, customers can only use it if they request a product upgrade, meaning they must pay a fee to activate this option after the initial purchase. A team of researchers from the University of Passau conducted a study to analyse the effects of such product upgrades on customers. The title: "You want to sell this to me twice!? How perceptions of betrayal may undermine internal product upgrades.”
Such product upgrades were popular in, for example, the automotive industry, which is now moving away from them. The main author of the study is Dr Janina Garbas, who completed her doctorate at the Chair of Marketing and Innovation under the supervision of Professor Jan Schumann. The study is the main part of her dissertation. "We had the right instinct early on with our research question, and our findings have now been confirmed in practice. Customer acceptance is low and the introduction and implementation of the model is therefore a major challenge," says Professor Schumann, co-author of the study.
For this work, which was published in the renowned Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the team of authors has now been awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of service marketing: the 2024 SERVSIG Best Service Article Award from the American Marketing Association (AMA) SERVSIG. The news was announced at the "Frontiers in Service" conference, held this year at the end of June in Florida, USA. Dr Garbas and her former doctoral supervisor Professor Schumann were unable to attend but found out about the good news via text and picture messages from colleagues.
Research as a team effort
"This makes our work the world's best paper in the field of services marketing in 2023 across all relevant journals," says Professor Schumann, who is also Vice President for Research at the University of Passau, explaining the significance of the award. "This is a great success that is highly recognised in our research community."
The President of the University of Passau, Professor Ulrich Bartosch, is also delighted. "Research in Passau is world class! I congratulate all the authors with pleasure and respect, and I am particularly proud of Dr Janina Garbas, Dr Sebastian Vetter and Professor Jan Schumann." Lead author Dr Garbas, who is currently working as a post-doc at RWTH Aachen University and will join ESCP Business School in Paris as an Assistant Professor in autumn, emphasised that the award was the merit of all the authors, because: "Research is always a team effort."
In the award-winning paper, Dr Garbas and her co-authors, including researchers from Arizona State University, demonstrate that customers develop a sense of betrayal when they can only use hardware components, such as seat heating, on a purchased product after paying for an upgrade. Innovative technology-driven business models are also at the centre of the other studies in her dissertation, with which Garbas achieved notable success at the world's most prestigious awards for young academics within and beyond the field of service research last year. She secured second place in the EMAC-Enginius Doctoral Competition 2023 in Odense, Denmark. At the "Frontiers in Service" conference, held in Maastricht in 2023, she was a finalist for the "SERVSIG Best Dissertation Awards in Service Research".
Wissenschaftlicher Ansprechpartner:
Professor Jan Schumann
Chair of Marketing and Innovation
University of Passau
Innstraße 27
94032 Passau
Jan.Schumann@uni-passau.de
Dr Janina Garbas
Post-Doc at the Chair of Marketing
RWTH Aachen
Kackertstraße 7
52072 Aachen
garbas@time.rwth-aachen.de
Originalpublikation:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-022-00881-8
Weitere Informationen:
https://www.digital.uni-passau.de/en/beitraege/2023/dissertation-of-janina-garbas Report and video portrait of Dr Janina Garbas' research in the Digital Research Magazine of the University of Passau
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