The marketing of services is fast becoming the hot new field on both domestic and international fronts. This stimulating Encyclopaedia is the first to offer a behavioral, managerial approach to this topic designed for todays business environment. The authors develop a model for understanding the relationship between quality and marketing in services and offer dozens of practical insights into ways to improve services marketing. Each part of the Encyclopaedia includes multiple chapters with strategies for understanding and closing the critical gaps. Customer behavior, expectations, and perceptions are discussed early in the text to form the basis for understanding services marketing strategy and the managerial content, in the rest of the text, is framed by the GAPS model. The authors point out that a service company that does relatively little presales marketing but is truly dedicated to delivering excellent quality service will have greater marketing effectiveness, higher customer retention, and more sales to existing customers than a company that emphasizes pre-sale marketing but falls short during actual service delivery. The focus of any company, they insist, must be customer satisfaction.