The services industry forms the backbone of the world economy, yet studies and researches in this field have been limited to just a few areas. Marketing practitioners have been facing a number of challenges due to the absence of conceptual studies on the evolution of services marketing. There is a need to develop some fresh paradigms for services marketing, as s now question the validity of the existing four paradigms of servicesintangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability especially with the advances in technology.

The services industry had matured in the developed world long before its spread into the developing economies. But there have not been much research and studies in the services area, especially in services marketing. Services marketing as compared to goods marketing is a relatively young field. Marketing in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries focused on selling agricultural goods and then expanded to include manufactured goods. Services were not seen as products to be marketed as such, but were viewed as support or aid factors to promotion and distribution. In pre-1980s, some research activities started focusing on the differences between goods and services, defining service characteristics and service processes. Deregulation of services in the US boosted the service sector there and stimulated research interest in early 1980s. The American Marketing Association took initiatives to conduct a series of marketing conferences related to services marketing. Many concepts of services marketing like classification of services, service quality, and service mapping took shape during this period. In the mid-1980s, a spurt in the growth of research activities in services was seen due to a large number of international conferences and new academic centers of services marketing in various management institutes. At this point of time, this field became more multidisciplinary and cross-functional in nature. (Berry and Parasuraman, 1993)

The late 1980s provided a new direction to services research with the development of scales to measure service quality. The focus gradually shifted from service quality to customer satisfaction, service recovery, customer relationship management, and customer retention, in the 1990s. The evolution of services marketing was classified into three stages by Brown, Fisk and Bitner (2003): "Crawling Out" (pre-1980), "Scurrying About" (1980-1985), and "Walking Tall" (since 1986). The services research in 1990s and early 2000s acquired more depth in different areas of services.

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