Dr. Neil Hair

Having just returned from Leipzig where Ryan Kearns (a recently graduated honors student at Saunders) and I presented a full paper. I wanted to report on a number of reflections. The first is on the community of relationship marketers. I love participating at this conference for a number of reasons, the collegiality amongst fellow supporters is near legendary in status. Unlike the large conference circuits where thousands of faceless people move like drones from one track to the next the colloquium is a single track affair. This presents several benefits - you get to meet everyone over a three day period. You get to listen to and feedback on everyones presentations. There are more opportunities to collaborate on future research projects. You receive specialized feedback on your work from some of the industries top scholars (including on this occasion, Gummerson, Ballantyne, Saren and Lobler amongst others) and most importantly you get to socially interact with these people who share a fundamentally common interest - relationships in marketing. Several important personal outcomes can be noted:

1. Extremely positive feedback on a piece of exploratory research Ryan and I are working on regarding the perceptions of consumers relationships with electronic retailers. Expect a forthcoming journal article on this in the not too distant future. Ryan has subsequently been offered a fee waiver for a place to study at the University of Westminster in the UK on a PhD programme and is considering several other options that were made available to him as a result of his conference presentation.

2. Several opportunities to work with international scholars on relationship marketing issues - most notably my friend Lyle Wetsch from the university of St Johns who begins a research sabbatical later this year. Looking forward to it Lyle.

3. A rekindled love affair with Germany. I was not expecting much from Leipzig to be honest, a former East German city with a population of about half a million. To my surprise the city is beautiful, comprised mainly of service sector employment, heavily populated by students (40,000) and thoroughly cosmopolitan in nature. Just what Rochester needs to be in my humble opinion! I cant wait to go back and will add this city to a very short list of those that I have fallen in love with.