Raymond P. Fisk
DR. RAYMOND P. FISK is Founder and President of ServCollab.
ServCollab is a service research collaborative for diagnosing and treating humanity’s service system problems.
Ray is also Emeritus Professor of Marketing at Texas State University. His research focuses on service. Recent topics have included service design, transformative service, and serving humanity. He has published his service research in numerous journals and presented it at service conferences throughout the world. He has taught previously at universities in Arizona, Oklahoma, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. In 1987, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria. He has also taught in Chile, Finland, Ireland, Jamaica, Mexico, and Portugal.
He has published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, Service Industries Journal, Journal of Service Management, Journal of Health Care Marketing, Journal of Marketing Education, Marketing Education Review and others. He has published six books: Serving Customers: Global Services Marketing Perspectives; Services Marketing: An Interactive Approach, 4th Ed.; Services Marketing Self-Portraits: Introspections, Reflections and Glimpses from the Experts; Marketing Theory: Distinguished Contributions; AIRWAYS: A Marketing Simulation; and Services Marketing: An Annotated Bibliography.
Ray is Past President of the American Marketing Association's Academic Council. He founded the AMA Services Marketing Special Interest Group (SERVSIG) in 1993 and has served SERVSIG in many other leadership roles. The American Marketing Association made him the Inaugural Recipient of the SIG Leadership Award in 2016. He received the Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award from SERVSIG in 2005. In 2012, he received the Grönroos Service Research Award from the CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management at the Department of Marketing, Hanken School of Economics, Finland. in 2020, he received the Steve Baron Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Service Community from the Journal of Services Marketing.
ABOUT ME
My Story
My childhood began in the small town of Yuma, Arizona, continued in small towns in Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico, but it ended in the very cosmopolitan Las Vegas, Nevada. As a high school student, Las Vegas was accidental preparation for studying customers in the service systems they inhabit. For fun, my high school buddies and I would hang out in the many large Vegas casinos and watch the people. We watched the amazing spectacle of people gambling for hours, almost always losing money, and still walking away smiling. People are remarkably strange!
My three college degrees are all from Arizona State University. When I first took marketing, it was as a pre-law student steeped in the turbulent civil rights and anti-war unrest of the 1960s. I chose law because I wanted to help change the world into a fairer place for everyone. I thought the legal system was the way to do that. I knew virtually nothing about marketing, but I was immediately entranced by the fundamental power of persuasion. The legal use of force is the essence of the legal system, but marketers can’t force anyone to do anything. They can only attempt to persuade. It was then I decided that marketing had the power to be the most ethical system for influencing human behavior for the better. To my young mind, fairness required ethical behavior.