Services have always aimed to meet human needs, with decades of valuable research advancing our understanding of service quality, customer satisfaction, and consumer adoption. As we design the human-centred services of tomorrow, however, we encounter new complexities that challenge us to broaden our perspective beyond what could be seen as predominately cognitive perspectives to service outcomes. While these cognitive focused approaches to service quality and adoption remain important, today’s increasingly sophisticated service landscapes from AI-powered interactions to hyper-personalised digital experiences can overwhelm consumers with too many options, excessive automation, or a lack of genuine human connection. In striving for seamless service delivery, we risk overlooking our customers as complex emotional beings who experience stress, anxiety, joy, and meaning through service encounters, experiences that directly influence their overall well-being. The pressing question for the future becomes: how can we design and market services that centre human emotions and well-being?
This evolving landscape, where services may be physical, digital, or a blend of both, presents both challenges and opportunities for service researchers and practitioners. As services span these diverse domains and present varying forms of customer interaction, service scholars are well-positioned to offer deeper insights into how such experiences shape emotional responses and consumer well-being. Furthermore, rather than treating emotions as secondary outcomes or broadly categorising them as positive or negative, the field must advance by examining discrete emotions (such as joy, excitement, pride, anger, sadness, and disgust) and how these shape not only traditional service metrics but also a broad range of well-being outcomes. This shift calls for the adoption of new theoretical frameworks, innovative methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaborations that integrate marketing, psychology, design, and technology research.
The aim of this special issue is to encourage service marketing scholarship, including research from a transformative service research (TSR) perspective, to expand its focus to include the roles of emotions and wellbeing. We therefore call for research that examines how services across physical, digital, and hybrid contexts influence consumer emotional responses and well-being, whether positively or negatively, and in both the immediate and longer term. We particularly encourage studies that explore a spectrum of emotional experiences, from stress, anxiety, and frustration to joy, pride, and awe. We welcome a wide range of methodological approaches, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, as well as conceptual contributions, literature reviews, and methodological papers.
List of topic areas
• Stress, anxiety, and coping mechanisms when services fail or frustrate
• Discrete emotions as explanatory mechanisms for service use or abandon
• Emotional outcomes from transformative services
• Studies considering the design or employment of AI services that reduce customer anxiety
• How frontline employees can shape customers discrete emotions
• The impact of frontline employee’s discrete emotions on customers
• The role of discrete emotions in transformative service experiences (e.g., awe in travel, pride in self-improvement services)
• Designing physical/digital servicescapes that evoke emotional responses
• Emotional labour and psychological work required from consumers and service employees in physical and or AI service interactions
• Anticipatory emotions and their impact upon service usage
• Pschological burden/manipulations inherent in gamified service elements (points, badges, pressure to engage)
• How consumers experiencing vulnerability navigate digital-first service environments
• Mental health impacts of digital service engagement and surveillance
• Methodological innovations for studying emotional service experiences
Journal Information: Scopus Journal Q1 , H-Index 130
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jsmktg
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jsm
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to.”
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Key deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 09/02/2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/07/2026
For more details refer here
