Do services marketers' success measures match their strategies?

The paper seeks to show that the strategic types of service marketers (e.g. Prospectors, Defenders or Analyzers) match the types of success measures that they use to evaluate new services.

A theory is developed to show why service marketers of different strategic types use different success measures for the evaluation of new services. Using responses from 202 financial services marketers, strategic types are shown to relate in theoretically expected ways with the importance ratings of the categorized success measures.

Notable relationships among strategic types and their success measure are identified. Prospectors, for example, attach greater importance to growth performance measures, consistent with the growth orientation of their service development programs. Defenders, on the other hand, attach more importance than Prospectors to efficiency performance measures, which relate to their programs' efficiency orientation. Analyzers, interestingly, place more emphasis on objectives‐based performance measures, including strategic fit, than Prospectors.

The sampling frame purposely contains only US financial services firms; as such, future research may build upon this single‐industry, single‐country study.

Academic success literature generally disregards the strategic types of respondents in measuring the success of service development programs. Practitioners, however, seek performance measures that are consistent with their firm's business strategy. This study provides a categorization of the most important success measures as appropriate to different strategic types.

The service success literature has often dealt with the question of “what causes success?” and has rarely confronted, head‐on, the question of “what is success?”. This paper addresses this critical research gap.