Faculty Profile for Dr. Ray Fisk

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Dr. Fisk received his B.S. in Marketing, an M.B.A. with an emphasis in marketing, and his Ph.D. in Marketing all from Arizona State University.

He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at Texas State University and Honorary Professor of International Studies. Previously, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Marketing at Texas State University from 2007 to 2019. He also served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Marketing at the University of New Orleans from 1996 to 2007. Before his department chair years, he was on the marketing faculty at the University of Central Florida and Oklahoma State University.

He has published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Management, Journal of Service Marketing, Service Industries Journal, Service Science, and others. He has published six books: Serving Customers: Global Services Marketing Perspectives; Services Marketing: An Interactive Approach, 4th Ed.; Services Marketing Self-Portraits: Introspections, Reflections and Glimpses from the Experts; Marketing Theory: Distinguished Contributions; AIRWAYS: A Marketing Simulation; and Services Marketing: An Annotated Bibliography.

Dr. Fisk is Past President of the American Marketing Association's Academic Council. He founded the AMA Services Marketing Special Interest Group (SERVSIG) in 1993 and has served SERVSIG in many leadership roles. The American Marketing Association made him the Inaugural Recipient of the SIG Leadership Award in 2016. In 2018, he founded ServCollab, a nonprofit organization for "Serving Humanity Through Collaboration." In 2020, he received the Steve Baron Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Service Community from the Journal of Services Marketing.

Dr. Fisk retired from Texas State in 2022. His primary professional identity is as Founder and President of ServCollab. ServCollab's mission is "to serve humanity through research collaborations that catalyze reducing suffering, improving well-being, and enabling well-becoming.”

Teaching Interests

Dr. Fisk strives to teach his students the innovative new topics that they might need after college. This includes being the first person to teach Services Marketing at Oklahoma State University (OSU), the University of Central Florida (UCF), the University of New Orleans (UNO), and Texas State. Other topics he pioneered across more than 40 years at four universities include Technology and Marketing, Health Care Marketing, Services Marketing Research, and Engineering Management.

In 1987, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria to teach services marketing. He has also taught in Chile, Finland, Ireland, Jamaica, Mexico, and Portugal.

At Texas State, he pioneered the Honors Edition of Principles of Marketing, which he taught for five years. In Spring 2020 and Spring 2021, he taught Service Design. The Service Design class is the first of its kind in American business schools.

During 2021, he pioneered a new approach to teaching the Marketing Management course. Business schools, for most of their history, have narrowly focused on monetary economic systems. The prevailing logic that separated monetary economic systems from human social systems is partially responsible for many flaws in corporate America today. Unfortunately, far too many modern corporations have put the pursuit of profits before people.

Fortunately, a new corporate form called benefit corporations (or B Corps) emerged in 2007. B Corps balance purpose and profit. They seek to be a “global movement of people using business as a force for good.” B Corps take a stakeholder approach and are legally required to serve the needs of customers, workers, community, and the environment.

Dr. Fisk's Marketing Management students begin by each proposing a hypothetical B Corp that they wish to start. Then teams are formed around the most popular B Corp proposals. The B Corp teams analyze the needs of customers, workers, community, and the environment and then write and present their marketing plans to serve the needs of these four stakeholders.

At Texas State, Dr. Fisk has supervised six Honors Theses and was Second Reader on three Honors Theses. While Texas State does not have a marketing doctoral program, he has co-supervised three external PhD student dissertations (one in Australia and two in Portugal). While at OSU, he supervised three PhD dissertations. Also, he has mentored many doctoral students and early career scholars internationally through his involvement and leadership in the American Marketing Association (AMA).

In 1995, he received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from the College of Business at UCF.

Research Interests

Dr. Fisk's service research has focused on three major themes: service history, service design, and serving humanity.

In Google Scholar, his current citation count places him 4th among all faculty at Texas State – https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_org&hl=en&org=7854988690913388420&before_author=JaD5_0IjAAAJ&astart=0. The most successful years of his academic research career have happened at Texas State. For example, nine of his twenty most cited articles were published after he joined Texas State in 2007.

Given that Dr Fisk was also a Department Chair for 23 years of his academic career, this is a significant accomplishment. He has published in all of the service research journals as well as many highly ranked marketing journals. Notably, he has coauthored with more than 140 service researchers from around the world.

Dr. Fisk has given more than 120 international research presentations in 21 different countries, which include numerous plenary presentations. One of his most notable research presentations was on February 15th, 2020. He gave a TEDx Talk for TEDxTexasStateUniversity titled “How Serving Each Other Can Save Humanity.” That talk was a culmination of his more than 40 years of service research.

His research has been externally recognized with the Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award from the AMA Services Marketing Special Interest Group (SERVSIG) in 2005. He has also been one of 13 Distinguished Faculty members for the Center for Services Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University from 2009-Present. In addition, he received the Grönroos Service Research Award from the CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management at the Department of Marketing, Hanken School of Economics, Finland in 2012. He was the second recipient and first American to receive this award.