Dwayne D. Gremler is a social scientist, academic, and author. He is a Professor of Marketing, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Distinguished Research Professor in the Schmidthorst College of Business at Bowling Green State University. He is a co-author of the textbook Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm, now in its 8th edition.
Gremler’s research interests span the fields of marketing with emphasis on service marketing and management, and focuses on the topics of emotion management in services, customer-employee rapport in service interactions, word-of-mouth communication, customer loyalty, and service guarantees.
Gremler has been appointed as Research Faculty at Arizona State University’s Center for Services Leadership, as an Associate Member of Center for Service Management Loughborough University, and as Visiting International Professor at the University of Münster.
Education
Gremler graduated in Mathematics from Arizona State University in 1980. Later on, he enrolled for an M.B.A. in Marketing, and graduated in 1990. In 1995, he completed his education at Arizona State University with a Ph.D. in Marketing under the supervision of Stephen W. Brown. His dissertation was titled, "The Effect of Satisfaction, Switching Costs, and Interpersonal Bonds on Service Loyalty".
Career
Gremler started his academic career at Arizona College of the Bible as an Instructor (and Basketball Coach) in 1987. After completing his Ph.D., he served as an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Idaho from 1995 till 2000. Subsequently, he was appointed as an Associate Professor of Marketing at Bowling Green State University in 2000, and was promoted to Professor of Marketing in 2007. He is a former Fulbright Scholar who taught service marketing at the University of Maastricht. He is a Visiting International Professor at the University of Münster, and on the Research Faculty of the Center for Services Leadership in the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
In 2015, he was appointed by the Bowling Green State University Board of Trustees as Distinguished Teaching Professor and, in 2022, as Distinguished Research Professor. He is the only professor at Bowling Green State University to receive both appointments. He served for three years on the Academic Council for the American Marketing Association. In addition to that, he was the Chair of American Marketing Association’s Services Marketing Special Interest Group from 2002 to 2003, served for two years as the Mentoring Coordinator of this group. He has also served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Service Research since 2014.
Research
Gremler has authored over 100 publications, including peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and conference papers. His research focuses on service management and particularly addresses emotion management in services, customer-employee rapport in service interactions, word-of-mouth communication, customer loyalty in service organizations, and service guarantees.
Service management
With a focus on relationship marketing, Gremler's works have explored how to manage customer relational benefits in services. His research has identified benefits customers receive from having developed relationships with service firms, and classified them into three primary categories: confidence, social, and special treatment benefits. His later research also evaluated relational benefits and relationship quality and showed that the concepts of customer satisfaction, social, and confidence benefits tend to impact relationship marketing outcomes. The role of customer engagement both psychological and behavioral engagement has been identified with his more recent research, which has reported that behavioral customer engagement is influenced by psychological customer engagement.