Academia by its nature is conservative and hidebound. New ideas and concepts gain acceptance slowly. In this context, the early services marketing scholars were true risk takers. They found relatively few publication outlets enthusiastic about their work, and they confronted a discipline debating whether services marketing was significantly distinctive. Today services marketing scholars work in a far more receptive environment. Between 1990 and 1992, for example, 20 books and more than 150 scholarly papers and journal articles were published on the general topic of services marketing – with a number of them in the top marketing journals. This tally does not even begin to include the myriad publications in every subfield of services marketing (such as health care, financial, professional, non-profit, education, hospitality, government). And now numerous conferences and symposia are held annually in Europe and the United States, allowing services researchers to present and publish their work.