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This paper aims to emphasize two key research priorities central to the domain of service marketing.

Reflections based on conceptual analysis of the current level of knowledge of service as an offering and of the nature of service marketing in the literature.

It is observed that research into marketing and into service as an object of marketing, or as an offering, has been neglected for two decades and more. It is also shown that to restore its credibility, marketing needs to be reinvented. Furthermore, the point is made that if a proper understanding of service as an object of, for example, innovation, design, branding and development is lacking, or even only implicitly present, valid research into those and other important topics is at risk.

This paper discusses two neglected topics within the domain of service research. Other important areas of future research are not covered. However, the paper offers directions for service marketing research fundamental to the development of the discipline.

In earlier discussions of service and service marketing research priorities, the observation that service and marketing are neglected topics that need to be studied and further developed has not been made. The paper emphasizes that service marketing research also needs to return to its roots and suggests possible directions for future research.

This paper aims to develop an alternative perspective on marketing informed by service scholarship to resolve marketing’s challenges as a discipline and practice.

This paper is conceptual and builds on the ongoing debate regarding marketing’s challenges and on service research to develop a new alternative marketing perspective and model, which could contribute to reforming marketing.

An analysis of the current understanding of marketing showed that the discipline’s myopic focus on activities, which disregards what marketing is as a phenomenon, is the primary reason for the prevailing problems and failure to reform marketing. Based on research into service logic (SL), the paper demonstrates that a higher level view of service can be characterized as the provision of help to the users of goods and services to ensure that these goods and services deliver meaningful assistance in their lives and work. This suggests that the ultimate objective for marketing is to make firms meaningful to the users of their goods and services.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, since this paper is the first to conceptually develop a perspective on marketing and a corresponding model informed by service scholarship, more conceptual and empirical research is necessary. Developing the new meaningfulness-based perspective and model for marketing brings a new approach to the process of resolving marketing’s current troubled situation.

The meaningfulness approach to marketing enables customer-centered marketing strategies to be implemented. Such strategies include both demand-stimulating and demand-satisfying programs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to examine marketing’s troubled situation from a service research and SL perspective.

In servitization research, there has been a call to move further toward the development of business models based on a service approach. This article aims to answer this call by adopting service logic (SL) and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a service-centric business model called servification, defined as the process of identifying and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a business model based on SL.

This article is conceptual and extends servitization in the direction of service-centric business model innovation by drawing on and extending SL.

The article defines service as a higher-order concept according to SL and develops the concept of a helping strategy as the foundation for a service-based business model. Further, it develops a typology of organizational resources and processes that must be developed for the emergence of such a business model.

Since this article is the first to conceptually develop servification, more both theoretical and empirical research is naturally required. The development of servification takes servitization in the direction of service-based business model innovation and also contributes to the research on SL.

Servification enables the development of service-centric strategies and organizational resources and processes and service-based business models.

This article is the first to adopt SL in studies of business model innovation.

This paper aims to develop and apply a service design method that allows for stronger recognition and integration of human activities into the front-end stages of the service design process.

Following a discussion of different service design perspectives and activity theory, the paper develops a method called activity-set mapping (ActS). ActS is applied to an exploratory service design project to demonstrate its use.

Three broad perspectives on service design are suggested: (1) the dyadic interaction, (2) the systemic interaction and (3) the customer activity perspectives. The ActS method draws on the latter perspective and focuses on the study of human activity sets. The application of ActS shows that the method can help identify and visualize sets of activities.

The ActS method opens new avenues for service design by zooming in on the micro level and capturing the set of activities linked to a desired goal achievement. However, the method is limited to activities reported by research participants and may exclude unconscious activities. Further research is needed to validate and refine the method.

The ActS method will help service designers explore activities in which humans engage to achieve a desired goal/end state.

The concept of “human activity set” is new to service research and opens analytical opportunities for service design. The ActS method contributes a visualization tool for identifying activity sets and uncovering the benefits, sacrifices and frequency of activities.

Previous research reports mixed results regarding the performance impact of servitization in manufacturing firms. To resolve this, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptually consistent and comprehensive measurement framework for both dimensions, servitization and its performance effect, and apply in a configurational analysis to reexamine previous evidence, arriving at a configurational theory of the relationship between servitization and firm performance.

Combining systematic literature review (SLR) and inductive reasoning, the existing indicators for servitization and performance are identified and clustered into groups that adequately represent both dimensions. The dataset is reanalyzed against the resulting framework to identify the configurational patterns and to formulate the theoretical propositions.

Financial and nonfinancial indicators of servitization and its performance impact are organized into a comprehensive measurement framework grounded on existing research. The subsequent meta-analysis shows that the positive or negative impacts of servitization on performance depend on how firms implement servitization strategies and which performance aspects are examined.

The results explain when servitization can be successful and confirm the existence of the so-called servitization paradox. The meta-analysis identified patterns that explain the previous mixed results, shaping a configurational theory of servitization. Thus, the measurement framework is conceptually robust and has sufficient detail to capture servitization and its performance outcome as it feasibly distinguished between different organizational configurations.

The framework provides a comprehensive portfolio of indicators for both managers and scholars to measure servitization intensity and performance. This supports managers of servitizing firms in leading this organizational transformation while avoiding its organizational and financial paradoxes.

This study aims to understand and explain how institutional change occurs at the level of value co-creation practices in service ecosystems. Despite the centrality of collective practices to the service ecosystems perspective, theoretically grounded explanations of how practices change and become institutionalized remain underdeveloped. Applying the theory of routine dynamics, this paper addresses two questions as follows: what does the institutional change mean at the level of value co-creation practices and what processes underlie these changes?

The study develops a conceptual framework that characterizes value co-creation practices as routines involving three aspects, namely, ostensive, performative and artifactual. As a key element in institutional change, the interplay between these informs an account of institutional change processes in service ecosystems.

The proposed conceptual framework specifies the conditions for institutional change in terms of value co-creation routines. First, any such change is seen to be grounded in alignment between changing institutional rules and the ostensive, performative and artifactual aspects of routines. Second, this alignment is seen to emerge through a dialectics of planned and practice-based activities during institutional change. An empirical research agenda is proposed for the analysis of institutional change processes in different service ecosystems.

This conceptual framework extends existing accounts of how service ecosystems change through the contributions of multiple actors at the level of value co-creation practices.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the development of the quality movement in Sweden since the mid-20th century. The authors are convinced that a summary of the Swedish quality journey so far will offer important lessons for further quality improvements in Sweden and elsewhere.

The authors study how the quality movement has been included in the industrial agenda and how it has been adopted in student curricula and in research. The authors have a focus on how business leaders have learnt, adopted, adapted and innovated with respect to quality development. often in collaboration with academia.

Although the quality movement has fit well with the Swedish culture and that successful corporate leaders have successfully used the specific cultural characteristics there is still a lot to be learnt with respect to the public sector, where the ideas from the quality movement have problem to overcome institutional barriers.

The study is limited to the Swedish context.

There is a serious need to revitalize the public sector by getting leaders and politicians to understand the need for systematic quality improvement.

If future Swedish achievements with respect to healthcare and other social welfare elements are to once again become world-class, the public sector needs to be open-minded and collaborate with the industrial sector and academia to find cost-effective strategies for making quality improvements. However, the private sector must also be alert not to be overtaken by some highly active Asian countries.

Swedish large companies have been very successful in applying quality leadership – however, in the public sector, this has not been the case. Suggestions for improvement are made.

Only a few concepts in the service literature are as pervasive yet as undertheorized as is the concept of the actor. With a growing interest toward value creation as a systemic and institutionally guided phenomenon, there is a particular need for a more robust conceptualization of humans as actors that adopts a processual, as opposed to a static, view. The purpose of this paper is to build such processual conceptualization to advance service-dominant (S-D) logic, in particular, and service research, in general.

The paper is conceptual and extends S-D logic's institutionally constituted account of the actor by drawing from identity theory and social constructionism.

The paper develops a processual conceptualization of the human actor that explicates four social processes explaining the dynamics between two identity concepts—social and personal identity—and institutional arrangements. The resulting framework reveals how humans are simultaneously constituted by institutions and able to perform their roles in varying, even institution-changing, ways.

By introducing new insights from identity theory and social constructionism, this paper reconciles the dualism in S-D logic's current description of actors, as well as posits the understanding of identity dynamics and the processual nature of actors as central in many service-related phenomena.

This paper is among the few that explicitly theorize about the nature of human actors in S-D logic and the service literature.

This study assesses the impact of marital status towards customer-centric measures in a Canadian ski resort using the importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) as the analytical framework. For the purpose of this paper, the three groups that were assessed included singles, partnership without children and partnership with children as marital status indicators. From the theoretical and especially managerial point of view, knowing the importance and the performance of the relevant ski resort-related customer-centric perceptions is of key importance.

A survey was completed to assess customer-centric measures including customer satisfaction, repurchase intent, value for money, willingness to recommend, overall performance in terms of meeting expectations, relationship quality and skiing service quality. An IPMA was conducted with partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to assess the importance-performance perceptions of the three marital status groups.

The results indicated that for five of the seven customer-centric measures, there were significant differences between the marital status groups. Overall, singles appeared to have the lowest values in customer-centric measures, whereas respondents living in partnership with children had the highest. This was also the case with the value for money perceptions, although the cost for the ski resort visit was likely to be the highest for the respondents living in partnership with children. There were also differences between the marital status groups in terms of the importance-performance evaluations.

Results of this research have implications for ski resort management as the three marital status groups appear to perceive the customer-centric measures quite differently in the IPMA framework.

The purpose of this paper is to study the operation mechanism of the ecosystem of crowd innovation space. Though the crowd innovation space is a new product of China's innovation-driven strategy, there are some barriers in operation. So, this problem is worthy of study.

In this study, data were obtained through four-month field investigation and semistructured interview, then classified and analyzed through grounded theory, because grounded theory is conducive to the exploration and discovery of new theories.

This study finds that the relationship between makerspace and entrepreneurs is strong social relational embeddedness. The relationship between crowd innovation space and governments and investment institutions is economic relational embeddedness. Under these social network ties, entrepreneurs, crowd innovation space, social investment institutions and so on can interact directly with each other to different degrees, carry out value cocreation activities and improve the benefits of all elements in the ecosystem and the ecosystem itself.

This study researches the operation mechanism of crowd innovation space ecosystem and identifies the ties between various elements in the ecosystem on the perspective of social network, which is conducive to improve the self-generating capacity of crowd innovation space and enhance the success rate of entrepreneurship.