The evolving brand logic: a service-dominant logic perspective

The meanings of brand and branding have been evolving over the past several decades. This evolution is converging on a new conceptual logic, which views brand in terms of collaborative, value co-creation activities of firms and all of their stakeholders and brand value in terms of the stakeholders’ collectively perceived value-in-use. The authors argue that this new logic parallels and reflects the related, evolving service-dominant (S-D) logic in marketing. They provide an historical account of the branding literature, organize it into eras, and connect it to the evolution in marketing as captured by S-D logic. The analysis provides further support for the S-D logic of marketing and suggests a related research agenda for furthering the understanding of brand and branding. It also suggests that marketing managers might benefit from investing resources in building strong brand relationships with all of their stakeholders and a service-dominant firm philosophy built around brand value co-creation.     

Expanding understanding of service exchange and value co-creation: a social construction approach

According to service-dominant logic (S-D logic), all providers are service providers, and service is the fundamental basis of exchange. Value is co-created with customers and assessed on the basis of value-in-context. However, the extensive literature on S-D logic could benefit from paying explicit attention to the fact that both service exchange and value co-creation are influenced by social forces. The aim of this study is to expand understanding of service exchange and value co-creation by complementing these central aspects of S-D logic with key concepts from social construction theories (social structures, social systems, roles, positions, interactions, and reproduction of social structures). The study develops and describes a new framework for understanding how the concepts of service exchange and value co-creation are affected by recognizing that they are embedded in social systems. The study contends that value should be understood as value-in-social-context and that value is a social construction. Value co-creation is shaped by social forces, is reproduced in social structures, and can be asymmetric for the actors involved. Service exchanges are dynamic, and actors learn and change their roles within dynamic service systems.     

Critical service logic: making sense of value creation and co-creation

Because extant literature on the service logic of marketing is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation, the roles of both service providers and customers remain analytically unspecified, without a theoretically sound foundation for value creation or co-creation. This article analyzes value creation and co-creation in service by analytically defining the roles of the customer and the firm, as well as the scope, locus, and nature of value and value creation. Value creation refers to customers’ creation of value-in-use; co-creation is a function of interaction. Both the firm’s and the customer’s actions can be categorized by spheres (provider, joint, customer), and their interactions are either direct or indirect, leading to different forms of value creation and co-creation. This conceptualization of value creation spheres extends knowledge about how value-in-use emerges and how value creation can be managed; it also emphasizes the pivotal role of direct interactions for value co-creation opportunities.     

The effects of customer participation in co-created service recovery

The benefits of customer co-creation of value in the service context are well recognized. However, little is known about service failures in a co-creation context and the consequent roles of both firms and customers in the advent of service recovery. In conceptualizing a new construct, “customer participation in service recovery,” this study proposes a theoretical framework that delineates the consequences of the construct and empirically tests the proposed framework using role-playing experiments. The results indicate that, when customers participate in the service recovery process in self-service technology contexts, they are more likely to report higher levels of role clarity, perceived value of future co-creation, satisfaction with the service recovery, and intention to co-create value in the future. Theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed. Authors are listed alphabetically.     

B2B relationship calculus: quantifying resource effects in service-dominant logic

Increasingly, knowledgeable business-to-business (B2B) customers and evolving customer needs are leading to seismic shifts in vendor–client interactions. Across industries, sellers are changing their business models from a simple goods orientation to a hybrid goods–services model, placing greater emphasis on delivering complete customer solutions. In such an environment, companies must find ways to prioritize investments in resource development. The service-dominant (S-D) logic framework offers significant insights into this challenge; however, these effects have not been tested quantitatively. This study addresses that gap, examining the influence of various seller resources on buyer satisfaction. An empirical analysis of buying organizations that purchased and implemented business intelligence systems finds that “augmented” operant resources that the buyers ascribe to the software’s sellers—resources that go above and beyond expectations—are the most significant predictors of both successful technology assimilation and overall customer relationship quality. In particular, an augmented operant resource reflecting a seller’s ability to see value creation opportunities from the buyer’s perspective (value mindset) has up to three times the effect on relationship satisfaction as “core” operant resources such as product-specific expertise or basic interpersonal service skills. These results can help sellers prioritize resource investments.     

Understanding the co-creation effect: when does collaborating with customers provide a lift to service recovery?

Because co-creation allows customers to help shape or personalize the content of their experience, it can affect customer satisfaction with recovery efforts, as well as offer a more cost-effective alternative to compensation. This article identifies specific situations in which co-creation is and is not useful. Study 1 tests the impact of co-creation in comparison with compensation for enhancing satisfaction with the recovery process and demonstrates that co-creation offers a cost-efficient strategy for companies when customers must deal with severe delays. Study 2 extends these results by showing that the impact extends to repurchase intentions. Study 3 details conditions in which co-creation harms evaluations. Finally, Study 4 explores whether it is necessary for the company to meet the customer??s requests when co-creating a recovery, as well as what happens when the company exceeds a customer??s requests. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and research directions that emerge from the studies.     

An expanded and strategic view of discontinuous innovations: deploying a service-dominant logic

The service-dominant logic (S-D logic) provides a novel and valuable theoretical perspective that necessitates a rethinking and reevaluation of the conventional literature on innovation. This literature is built upon a goods-dominant logic and has resulted in a restricted and out-moded perspective that overlooks many major discontinuous innovations. In this article, we show how many innovations can be better understood by deploying a S-D logic perspective. We present six S-D logic categories of discontinuous innovation positing that they can help scholars and managers analyze, design and implement breakthrough advances in resource use. We argue that discontinuous innovation can arise by changing any of the customers’ roles of users, buyers and payers on the first dimension. On the second dimension, the firm changes its value creation by embedding operant resources into objects, by changing the integrators of resources, and by reconfiguring value constellations. Finally, we offer some managerial and research implications of this expanded and strategic view of discontinuous innovation.

The theoretical underpinnings of customer asset management: A framework and propositions for future research

Most research in customer asset management has focused on specific aspects of the value of the customer to the company. The purpose of this article is to propose an integrated framework, called CUSAMS (customer asset management of services), that enables service organizations (1) to make a comprehensive assessment of the value of their customer assets and (2) to understand the influence of marketing instruments on them. The foundation of the CUSAMS framework is a careful specification of key customer behaviors that reflect the length, depth, and breadth of the customer-service organization relationship: duration, usage, and cross-buying. This framework is the starting point for a set of propositions regarding how marketing instruments influence customer behavior within the relationship, thereby influencing the value of the customer asset. The framework and propositions provide the impetus for a research agenda that identifies critical issues in customer asset management. Ruth N. Bolton (ruth.bolton@owen.vanderbilt.edu) is a professor of marketing in the Owen Graduate School of Business at Vanderbilt University. Her current research is concerned with high-technology services sold to business-to-business customers. Her most recent work in this area studies how organizations can grow the value of their customer base through customer service and support. Her earlier published research investigates how organizations’ service and pricing strategies influence customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as company revenues and profits. She has published articles in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Service Research, Marketing Letters, Marketing Science, and other journals. Katherine N. Lemon (katherine.lemon@bc.edu) is an associate professor in the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Her current research investigates the antecedents and consequences of customer-firm relationships. In addition, her research examines relevant metrics for measuring and managing the value of customer relationships. Her earlier published research investigates how emotional reactions (such as anticipated regret) inflence customer retention decisions. She has published articles in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Service Research, Marketing Science, theJournal of Product Innovation Management, and other journals. Peter C. Verhoef (verhoef@few.eur.nl) is an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His main research interest is customer asset management. He has also done research on other topics, such as waiting times, private labels, and out-of-stocks. He has been a visiting professor at the Tuck School of Business Dartmouth College in fall 2003. He has published a wide variety of articles in journals such as theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of Consumer Psychology.     

Customer value impact of sales contests

Although firms spend more than $26 billion annually on sales contests, no empirical research has investigated the effects of contests on individual customers. While some short-term firm effects of contests have been documented, the impact on long-term customer value has remained a matter of speculation. This research investigates the long-term customer impact of sales contests, by applying the customer value framework. We add to previous research that has used customer value of marketing programs by employing the acquired, retained, and add-on framework to segment customers based on their purchase history. We develop hypotheses drawing on theories in the buyer behavior, customer loyalty, and sales management domains. By disaggregating the overall customer value into initial and subsequent components, we demonstrate a greater long-term value per customer in the retained customer cohort and lower short-term and long-term value per customer among the two other cohorts (acquired and add-on customers). There is no adverse impact on other drivers of customer value such as customer churn and purchase frequency. While our study focuses on individual customer effects, we note the significantly higher volume of customers during the contest leads to a positive aggregate-level assessment. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for managers and researchers.     

Demand and supply integration: a conceptual framework of value creation through knowledge management

Strategy identifies two primary sets of processes through which the firm creates value for its customers by moving goods and information through marketing channels: demand-focused and supply-focused processes. Historically, firms have invested resources to develop a core differential advantage in one or other of these areas—but rarely in both—often resulting in mismatches between demand (what customers want) and supply (what is available in the marketplace). This paper suggests that successfully managing the supply chain to create customer value requires extensive integration between demand-focused processes and supply-focused processes that is based on a foundation of value creation through intraorganizational knowledge management. Integrating demand and supply processes helps firms prioritize and ensure fulfillment based upon the shared generation, dissemination, interpretation and application of real-time customer demand as well as ongoing supply capacity constraints. We draw upon literature in marketing, logistics, supply chain management and strategy to introduce a conceptual framework of demand and supply integration (DSI). We also offer insights for managerial practice and an agenda for future research in the relatively under-researched, but strategically important, area of demand and supply integration.     

Reconfiguration of the conceptual landscape: a tribute to the service logic of Richard Normann

This article is a tribute to the late Richard Normann, whose call for a “service logic” (Normann, Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape, Wiley, Chichester, p. 99, 2001) both parallels and enriches service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch, J. Mark, 68:1–17, 2004a). Like Vargo and Lusch, Normann shifted the focus of the offering from an output to a process of value creation and perceived the firm as an organizer of this process, with the customer as a co-producer, rather than a receiver of value. He also argued that offerings are “frozen knowledge,” similar to Vargo and Lusch’s contention that the basis of exchange is applied operant resources (service) and suggested that the ‘dematerialization’ of resources increases their ‘liquidity’, which allows increased “density” for value creation. Thus, he suggested that firms need to “reframe business”—rethink the logic of value creation—to reveal opportunities in reconfiguring the value constellations of which they are part. This tribute explores these and other similarities and differences between Normann’s work and the evolving S-D logic.     

Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution

Since the introductory article for what has become known as the “service-dominant (S-D) logic of marketing,” “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing,” was published in the Journal of Marketing (Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004a)), there has been considerable discussion and elaboration of its specifics. This article highlights and clarifies the salient issues associated with S-D logic and updates the original foundational premises (FPs) and adds an FP. Directions for future work are also discussed.     

服务逻辑的修正——基于价值创造的观点

采用理论分析和概念构建方法分别分析了基于消费者和基于供应商的服务逻辑以及价值创造，通过对交换价值和使用价值的探讨，首先明确了使用价值是价值创造的基础，顾客才是真正的价值创造者；其次指出企业采用服务逻辑可以参与到顾客价值生成过程当中，企业的市场提供物应该扩展到企业与顾客之间的互动，这样企业才能成为顾客价值的合作创造者；最后，提出了十个服务逻辑命题，以便为营销实践人员提供全新的视角理解顾客价值创造．为服务实践提供理论基础。     

Effects of dominance transitions on advice adherence in professional service conversations

For many professional services, advice adherence is a necessary condition for achieving service success for both customers and service providers. Despite their pivotal roles in value co-creation, typical conversational interactions often lead to low adherence. We propose that enabling a “dominance transition,” from provider dominance in the pre-advice stage to customer dominance in the post-advice stage, enhances advice adherence because it increases customers’ perceived common ground. Furthermore, providers’ consultation focus, customers’ prior knowledge, and customers’ perceived adherence effort moderate this process. Using mixed methods, including both empirical modeling and controlled and field experiments, we validate the proposed model in various contexts (healthcare, financial services, and fitness and wellness counseling). The findings establish several theoretical contributions and offer managerial implications for improving advice adherence by managing dominance transitions in conversational interactions more effectively through training service providers or even programming AI chatbots.

     

Customer value: The next source for competitive advantage

Driven by more demanding customers, global competition, and slow-growth economies and industries, many organizations search for new ways to achieve and retain a competitive advantage. Past attempts have largely looked internally within the organization for improvement, such as reflected by quality management, reengineering, downsizing, and restructuring. The next major source for competitive advantage likely will come from more outward orientation toward customers, as indicated by the many calls for organizations to compete on superior customer value delivery. Although the reasons for these calls are sound, what are the implications for managing organizations in the next decade and beyond? This article addresses this question. It presents frameworks for thinking about customer value, customer value learning, and the related skills that managers will need to create and implement superior customer value strategies.     

Marketing with integrity: ethics and the service-dominant logic for marketing

This paper examines a tendency within existing marketing scholarship to compartmentalize ethical issues. It also shows how this tendency can cause ethical tensions and conflicts in marketing practice. The emerging service-dominant (S-D) logic for marketing, as proposed by Vargo and Lusch, is explored as an example of an approach to marketing that overcomes this tendency. The S-D logic is found to be a positive development for marketing ethics because it facilitates the seamless integration of ethical accountability into marketing decision-making. Specific recommendations are made for improving the ethical climate in marketing using marketing performance measurement theory and practice.

基于顾客价值的酒店服务表现评估框架分析

服务是酒店管理的核心要素,它直接关系到客人对酒店的整体评价。不过,现有酒店业在服务表现评估中存在诸多问题．为了能够客观地评估和真实地反映酒店总体的服务表现。在已有研究的基础上引入顾客价值理论。提出了基于顾客价值的酒店服务表现评估框架．分别概括为顾客价值要素研究、评估模式研究、调查实施及策略分析4个阶段,对每一阶段都给出了指导性的操作办法,希望借此研究对酒店服务质量管理提供意见参考。     

自我决定感在顾客互动与社区满意间的中介作用——基于S-O-R理论和自我决定理论的实证研究

顾客互动已成为企业竞争优势的重要源泉,但有关顾客互动和价值共创的内在机制并未得到充分研究,顾客互动并未引起实践界和管理者的足够重视,本文将弥补这一缺陷并进行相关研究。本文以虚拟品牌社区为研究对象,从刺激—有机体—反应(S-O-R)理论和自我决定理论出发,剖析了顾客互动、顾客自我决定感和社区满意之间的关系。结果表明:产品互动和人际互动较强地促进了顾客的自我能力感和自我归属感,自我能力感显著地促进了社区满意,而自我归属感同社区满意之间的关系只是得到最低程度地支持。同时,本文也发现,自我能力感和自我归属感在顾客互动和社区满意之间扮演着中介作用角色。     

对现代企业经营理念的再认识

自20世纪70年代以来,学和企业经理们不断地探求顺应市场形势变化的企业经营新方法,从最初以产品为中心的单纯注重产品质量,到“以顾客为导向”的争取顾客满意与忠诚,直至90年代顾客价值概念的提出,将企业经营理念推向了一个全新的高度。本从历史和逻辑的角度分别剖析了“利润最大化”、“顾客最满意”和“顾客价值最大化”等企业经营理念,指出了在新形势下“利润最大化”和“顾客最满意”的不合时宜之处．并对“顾客价值最大化”的经营理念进行了战略定位分析。     

Using a customer-Level marketing strategy to enhance firm performance: A review of theoretical and empirical evidence

It is becoming increasingly apparent from the literature that marketers need to consider customer-level information when they generate a marketing strategy for the firm. In this article, the authors develop a customer-focused framework that uses a marketing strategy with an overall objective of maximized financial performance. This strategy is driven by seven customer-level marketing tactics and shows how actual customer data can be used to generate an actionable marketing strategy leading to optimal levels of profitability, customer equity, and shareholder value. In addition, the authors discuss a successful implementation of this strategy for several business-to-business and business-to-consumer firms and offer insights as to how to customize an implementation strategy for any firm, along with presenting potential challenges a firm may encounter during the implementation process. Several suggestions for future research are offered to explore and harness this newly available evidence. V. Kumar (VK) (vk@business.uconn.edu) is the ING Chair Professor of Marketing and the executive director of the ING Center for Financial Services at the University of Connecticut. He spends his time by transferring his knowledge (however little it may be) to his two daughters about customer lifetime value, diffusion models, forecasting sales and market share, retailing, and marketing strategy. J. Andrew Petersen (apetersen@business.uconn.edu) is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include customer lifetime value, word-of-mouth effects, and customer-level marketing strategy. His research has been published inMarketing Research Magazine and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science.