Public relations professionals use many methods to demonstrate their contribution to organizational goals, yet it is unclear how their attitudes towards evaluation and the reporting of success matches real outcomes. Ten years after the International Public Relations Association produced an evaluation gold paper, this study combines research on Australian practitioners' evaluation practices and attitudes, and data from industry awards to identify how practitioners demonstrate their accountability. Data suggest that despite the attention paid to evaluation by the academy and industry, practitioners still focus on measuring outputs, not outcomes to demonstrate performance and continue to rely heavily on media-based evaluation methods.

The focus of this paper is on levels of service failure and recovery strategies in relation to UK online fashion retailers. In a changing social, political and economic environment the use of information technology has permeated all forms of organisations: from private to public, local to global, old and new. Parallel with this development, companies have developed and experimented with new means of interacting with customers, and have devised and applied a variety of marketing strategies. The deployment of the internet, along with its subsets, has created a number of new opportunities, as well as a range of uncertainties and burdens, particularly on consumer perceptions of service quality, service failure and recovery. This paper contributes to extant knowledge and offers an understanding of behavioural-related issues, e.g. understanding consumer behaviour in the development of innovative business models in the industry.

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