Raymond Fisk is an American academic and author. He is a distinguished professor emeritus at Texas State University.
Fisk is known for his research on service theater, service history, service design, and transformative service. His works have been published in academic journals such as Journal of Retailing, Journal of Service Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Moreover, he is a fellow of the International Society for Service Innovation Professionals. Education Fisk completed his B.S. in Marketing in 1976, followed by an M.B.A. in Marketing in 1977 from Arizona State University. Later in 1980, he completed his Ph.D. in Marketing from the same institution. Career Fisk began his academic career at Oklahoma State University, serving as an assistant professor from 1980 to 1984 and an associate professor from 1984 to 1989. In 1989, he moved to the University of Central Florida, first as a visiting associate professor from 1989 to 1990, and then as an associate professor from 1990 to 1996. Between 1996 and 2007, he was a professor and chair of the Department of Marketing and Logistics at the University of New Orleans. He later joined the Department of Marketing at Texas State University, where he served as a professor until retiring in 2022, including a term as department chair from 2007 to 2019. Since retiring, he has held the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Texas State University.
Fisk has held various administrative and professional positions throughout his career. Between 1996 and 2007, he chaired the Department of Marketing & Logistics at the University of New Orleans, followed by an appointment as chair of the Department of Marketing at Texas State University from 2007 to 2019. Moreover, in 2018 he founded the human services nonprofit ServCollab and serves as president. Research In his early service theater research, Fisk examined how environmental and interpersonal factors shaped consumers’ service perceptions by applying Goffman’s dramaturgy framework, analyzing service encounters as theatrical performances and offering implications for improving service marketing. In 1989, he co-authored a book chapter with SJ Grove in the book titled Impression Management in the Organization. The chapter explored services marketing through a dramaturgical lens, proposing a general framework for impression management that distinguished services from goods, addressed descriptive challenges, and illustrated its application in hospital settings. His service history work provided a historical and bibliographic analysis of services marketing literature, tracing its evolution through key stages, highlighting major themes, legitimization in marketing journals, and offering a classification of outlets along with future research speculation. Furthermore, he also examined how other customers’ presence and behavior affected individual service experiences in shared environments, identifying positive and negative influences through customer incident reports and offering managerial insights for improving multi-customer service settings.
Fisk, through his research, also examined dysfunctional customer behavior, reviewed existing research, definitions, and methodological challenges, explored its negative and potential positive effects, and proposed a research agenda offering theoretically insightful and practically relevant directions for future study. He also introduced Multilevel Service Design (MSD), an interdisciplinary method for designing complex service systems, integrated service concept, service system, and service encounter levels, applied it to retail and banking, and emphasized co-created, integrated customer experiences. Additionally, he co-developed transformative service research, examining how interactions between service providers and consumers influenced well-being and proposing a conceptual framework with research questions in financial, health, and social services to guide future studies. Furthermore, he also explored how local governments and cultural organizations strategically managed place storytelling, engaged stakeholders to build regional identity, enhanced tourism and economic development, and improved digital-age marketing, supported by theoretical frameworks and case studies. Moreover, in his later research, he examined how the digital divide affected vulnerable customers in essential services and showed how inclusive service practices such as flexibility, coaching, and social facilitation built human capabilities, fostering digital inclusion and organizational pathways to reduce inequality. Awards and honors 1987-1988 – Fulbright Scholar, Klagenfurt University of Educational Sciences 2005 – Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award, American Marketing Association’s Services Marketing Special Interest Group 2009 – Distinguished Faculty, Center for Services Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University 2012 – Grönroos Service Research Award, CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management at the Department of Marketing, Hanken School of Economics, Finland 2016 – Inaugural Recipient, American Marketing Association SIG Leadership Award 2020 – Steve Baron Award, Journal of Services Marketing 2020 – Honorary Professor of International Studies, Texas State University 2023 – Fellow, International Society for Service Innovation Professionals Bibliography Books Marketing Theory: Distinguished Contributions (1984) Services Marketing: An Annotated Bibliography (1985) Services Marketing Self-Portraits: Introspections, Reflections, and Glimpses from the Experts (2000) Interactive Services Marketing, 3rd Edition, (2008) Serving Customers: Global Services Marketing Perspectives (2013) Services Marketing: An Interactive Approach (2013) Selected articles Fisk, R. P., Brown, S. W., & Bitner, M. J. (1993). Tracking the evolution of the services marketing literature. Journal of Retailing, 69(1), 61-103. Grove, S. J., & Fisk, R. P. (1997). The impact of other customers on service experiences: A critical incident examination of “getting along.” Journal of Retailing, 73(1), 63-85. Patrício, L., Fisk, R. P., Falcão e Cunha, J., & Constantine, L. (2011). Multilevel service design: From customer value constellation to service experience blueprinting. Journal of Service Research, 14(2), 180-200. Teixeira, J., Patrício, L., Nunes, N. J., Nóbrega, L., Fisk, R. P., & Constantine, L. (2012). Customer experience modeling: From customer experience to service design. Journal of Service Management, 23(3), 362-376. Anderson, L., Ostrom, A. L., Corus, C., Fisk, R. P., Gallan, A. S., Giraldo, M., ... & Williams, J. D. (2013). Transformative service research: An agenda for the future. Journal of Business Research, 66(8), 1203-1210. References