Relatively little research has addressed the nature and determinants of customer satisfaction following service failure and recovery. Two studies using scenario-based experiments reveal the impact of failure expectations, recovery expectations, recovery performance, and justice on customers’ postrecovery satisfaction. Customer satisfaction was found to be lower after service failure and recovery (even given high-recovery performance) than in the case of error-free service. The research shows that, in general, companies fare better in the eyes of consumers by avoiding service failure than by responding to failure with superior recovery.

This article presents a framework for understanding and revitalizing the important role of conceptual articles in the development of knowledge in the marketing discipline. An analysis of 30 years of publishing data from major marketing journals indicates that conceptual articles are declining, despite repeated calls for more emphasis on this form of scholarship. The sharpest decline has occurred in Journal of Marketing (JM), with much of the shift occurring over the past decade. Many substantive areas remain largely unexplored in conceptual articles. Over this 30-year period, conceptual articles published in JM have disproportionately more citations relative to their numbers, attesting to the importance of their role in knowledge development. Addressing the decline of conceptual articles and restoring their synergistic balance with other forms of scholarship will require concerted efforts on several interrelated fronts: the current generation of scholars; doctoral programs and students; journals, reviewers, and review process; and promotion, tenure, and incentive systems.

A key issue for marketers resulting from the dramatic rise of social media is how it can be leveraged to generate value for firms. Whereas the importance of social media for brand management and customer relationship management is widely recognized, it is unclear whether social media can also help companies market and sell products. Extant discussions of social commerce present a variety of perspectives, but the core issue remains unresolved. This paper aims to make two contributions. First, to address the lack of clarity in the literature regarding the meaning and domain of social commerce, the paper offers a definition stemming from important research streams in marketing. This definition allows for both a broad (covering all steps of the consumer decision process) and a narrow (focusing on the purchase act itself) construal of social commerce. Second, we build on this definition and develop a contingency framework for assessing the marketing potential that social commerce has to offer to firms. Implications for researchers and managers, based on the proposed definition and framework, are also discussed.