I had the good fortune of attending two marketing conferences in Queenstown, New Zealand.

First, the Gender, Marketing and Consumer Behaviour Conference was truely insightful for someone who has never delved in to gender based research before. The experience of the conference, and preparing for it, forced me to consider the research topics I cover from a gender perspective. The attendees were so supportive of my newness to the field as well. It was a great welcome to Queenstown. The paper at this conference, which focused on Liminal Space/Places, can be sourced here.

The Asia-Pacifc Association for Consumer Research Conference held a variety of insights. I was the last paper up, with an exploratory study correlating quintessence and perceptions of value. The paper can be sourced here.

I will shortly be leaving Queenstown and driving to visit the legendary Unviersity of Otago and having a look around.

This short video is a three minute update of the research I am conducting in to Customer Evangelism. Preliminary results are in and, as is usually the case with these kinds of things, the data supports some of the claims in the literature; doesn’t support others and with some–well, you just can’t tell what it is saying. By the way, I am speaking slowly in this video as it was originally put together for an audience of academics in China; so I tried to speak slowly for maximum comprehension.

This is a condensed version of a talk I delivered recently at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia.

In other news, I am thrilled to have a paper accepted to the Asia-Pacific Association for Consumer Research Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand in July 2012. The paper focuses on behaviours arising from Transcendent Customer Experiences and Quintessence. I was lucky enough to have two great co-authors on this: Jamie Murphy and Hanna Glaebe.

With several papers currently out for review I hope to have some more good news about further publications accepted soon. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

I recently was invited to travel to Auckland for a seminar at which Vargo & Lusch will be guests of Auckland University of Technology Business School. First of all, Auckland is a really cool place and I am excited to go. However, meeting the authors of one of the journal articles that changed my perspective on marketing is going to be a real privilege. Their 2004 paper “Evolving toward a Service-Dominant Logic” was packed with so much great stuff,I had a problem highlighting the important bits because in the end the whole paper was yellow.

You can find out more about Service-Dominant Logic on their blog; and, of course, on Wikipedia.

Professor Jamie Murphy and I recently had an article published comparing Service-Dominant Logic to an infinite game (hence the name of this blog) in the Journal of Customer Behaviour.

So, V&L, I am a fan. See you soon!

I am giving a lecture on ePublishing to students enrolled in the Bachelor of Creative Industries at ECU South West in Bunbury on Wednesday 11 May at 1pm. All welcome!