My name is Jochen Wirz. I'm Vice Dean Graduate Studies at the NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. So I look after all our MBA, Executive MBA and MSc programs there and what I find, why I enjoy this job so much is because I do research and teaching and consulting and service and services marketing.
I can apply all of this theory and learn. to my job as a Vice Dean which is fascinating. I'm also the professor of marketing and as I said focus really on services marketing and I teach mostly executive MBAs in services marketing.
We have three different executive MBA programs and do tons of research in the field. It's an interesting story actually because I started out in finance and accounting. That was my major in university and then I joined the bank. So I'm a fully licensed banker in Germany.
I took all the banking exams. But I had an outstanding marketing professor in my undergraduate days and he always said, Jochen, listen, marketing starts where accounting stops, right? Accounting is the rear view mirror where the numbers come through what you have done in the past. But what do we do in marketing? Marketing really is we create the future.
Tomorrow's products, solutions, tomorrow's markets, right? And I was really enthusiastic about marketing overall that after I worked for a few years in the bank I went to graduate studies to the London Business School and wanted to do a PhD in marketing, but I met my future PhD supervisor John Bateson there and he was all in services. He said services are the future. And I was sitting in this MBA class on services marketing and I was hooked and since then my entire career has been in services. So I did a PhD in services marketing, I worked in London for a few years in a consulting company with Logica Consulting.
We did a lot of work on pay TV, cable TV, media and so on, all the new technologies at that time. Then I worked for a consultancy owned by one of the professors at London Business School and to me this was also an outstanding experience. because we were an infrastructure type of services, distribution parks and so on.
And I grew up with East and West Germany. And suddenly the wall came down and half of our business was helping East Germany building up. And so this was, and again, I really applied services there in a big way in East Germany where nobody has heard about services marketing ever before. Then, of course, there's a lot of...
long story may ask, I worked in London, earned tons of money in London and I was happy in Europe but I met a lady in London who came from Asia and so she asked me and her parents asked me to look, you know, yes I'm happy to come to Europe and she will follow you anywhere after you get married but why don't you come to Asia first, get married and then after a year you move back again, right? So I took a year leave of absence from my company and joined National University of Singapore as a visiting professor. at that time and I never made the move back to Europe and never made the move out of academia anymore because I loved the job as a professor so much because you do you teach you do consulting you do research and as I just found this mix so exciting and energizing that I stayed at NUS since I worked during this time for many years with Arthur D. Little in management consulting and then later with Accenture and we did a lot of technology that time 3G license bids, churn diagnostics, CRM strategy design and implementation all these projects and again I found a very a great sort of synergy between my research and my teaching and my consulting to bring it all together as a package here and I think this is all of my journey in a way and service really has been my calling and my passion.
Thank you. I mean, asking about Christopher, it's an interesting story because my PhD supervisor then, John Bateson, was supervised by Christopher Lovelock. So Christopher Lovelock was a professor at Harvard and John Bateson did his DBA at Harvard. So I met Christopher via John.
And Christopher asked me, look, you know, Asia is growing and I have this US-based textbook. Can you help us to adapt that to Asia and bring in Asian cases, Asian theory, Asian examples, Asian pictures and so on to make it more relevant and let it more resonate with an Asian audience? And then I said, of course, I'd love to.
So I wrote the Services, Marketing and Asia textbook. And he liked it so much that he asked me when he did the fifth edition of his textbook, hey Johan, do you want to join me for the US edition? And so he made me contributing author, which is sort of a one edition, and he said, what would you change in my textbook?
And I just said at that time, and don't forget this was many years ago, there was no chapter on managing people in services. There was no big chapter really on customer loyalty. There was nothing really on service scapes. So you can see all the research that happened over the years. And I told Christoph, look, you know, if you want to bring in the current research on those topics, I'm happy to write a chapter on each.
So then I wrote the People chapter and he was so enthusiastic about it, he loved it so much, he says, Jochen, do you want to join me as a permanent co-author for the book? And that's how it then became, since then, the sixth and seventh and eighth edition I've been working on the textbook with him. Writing a textbook and producing new editions is really an excellent exercise to update yourself what happens in a field. So what I do is I have 15 chapters, so I go through all the literature that has published since the last edition, which is four to five years, and then I have these 15 piles in my office and it says chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3. Let's say there's one paper that is relevant for chapter 1 and chapter 8 and chapter 11. I just write chapter 1, 8 and 11 on it and put it on chapter 1 on that pile and then I rewrite chapter 1 and update it and this paper that's relevant then for the next chapter just moves further down the pile. So you get a pretty good idea of what happens in a field.
And many people always think, oh, academe is moving so slowly and what's the value add of academe to practice? Then I remind people, look, think about it. Today you talk about service recovery.
Every service business talks about service recovery. But that's something that didn't exist 30 years ago. It really came out from the services community. The same thing with revenue management and rate fences and all of that research. It is not that old actually.
So you can really pick chapter by chapter if you will and see All the innovations over the years that have come through there. To me, I mean of course CRM and lifetime value was one big, big push into the field. Service profit chain was one big sort of new way of thinking in services.
More recently, if you look what really changes of course the entire mobile apps, customer journey design. Everything about process automation and robotics, whatever you see on platform business models, these are all topics that are coming and they are sort of tiptoeing into the textbooks but in the next edition you will see there will be major components in those books. And you think, oh we have seen the internet revolution, right, that was one big thing and we even had courses on internet marketing, imagine that, right, today internet is everywhere and what we do. Then you had mobile and apps and all of this. Currently the biggest push is of course analytics as well, in addition to robotics and AI and all of those things.
And this will really transform services marketing as a field completely.