Christian Grönroos is Professor of Service and Relationship Marketing at the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Finland and chairman of the board of its research and knowledge centre CERS - Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management. As a guest professor he is also affiliated with Lund University in Sweden and Nankai University in China. He is one of the scholars pioneering modern service marketing and one of the earliest proponents of the term service management to describe market-oriented management of services in service and manufacturing firms. He introduced the concept of service competition to describe modern post-industrial, service and information technology driven competition. His research interests also include internal marketing, service quality, and relationship marketing or marketing based on customer relationship management. He has published extensively in fourteen languages on service marketing and management and relationship marketing issues.
Professor Grönroos is by far the internationally most cited scholar in business administration in Finland, all fields of management included. Internationally he has been found to be one of the three most prolific writers in the services field.
Professor Grönroos has received American Marketing Association’s (Service Group) 1999 Career Contributions To Services Discipline Award. In Scandinavia he has twice been awarded for his service management research: the Ahlsell Award for outstanding research into marketing and distribution, and the Erik Kempe Award for his textbooks on service management and marketing. He is a distinguished member of The Finnish Society of Science and Letters. He is also a member of The Academy of Marketing Science. He is one of the early developers of the school of service management and marketing thought that internationally has been labelled the Nordic School. In addition to his academic career he has frequently lectured on service management and marketing as well as relationship marketing in university-level executive programmes as well as in in-house seminars in service and manufacturing firms in Europe, North America, Latin America, China and Australasia.
Professor Grönroos’ visiting professor or visiting scholar associations include Arizona State University, Stanford University, Lund University and Karlstad University, Sweden, University of Auckland, New Zealand, Nankai University, P.R.China, and Thammasat University, Thailand.
