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An issue and event were tracked for 90 days on Twitter, cable television, and large newspapers. The mortgage and housing crisis was an ongoing issue, and the BP oil spill was an ongoing event. As expected, the results suggest media as a predictor of Twitter for the two issue agendas studied. However, this study shows that the agenda-setting effects on Twitter are not equal in regard to issues and events. The agenda-setting effect of the media appeared to be stronger for the issue observed here. Moreover, initial evidence is provided that agendas for the ongoing events were more volatile than ongoing issues. For ongoing events, it appears that agendas are most reflective of the real-world cues that initiate them. This suggests that when real-world cues are largely absent, the media are less salient, and the agenda is more stable and ongoing. Finally, increased temporality appears to better reveal agenda-setting effects for events. Relaxed temporal measures appear to reveal the agenda-setting effect of ongoing issues more effectively. Events are not all equal; neither are issues. As such, the media and Twitter behave differently. This distinction has not yet been made in the literature.

This paper uses practice theory to strengthen the theoretical relationship between customer engagement (CE) and value cocreation (VCC), thereby demonstrating how customers may become engaged and remain engaged through VCC practices.

The study adopts a problematization approach to identify shared assumptions evident in service-dominant logic (SDL) and CE research. Practice theory, as a higher-order perspective, is used to integrate the iterative and cyclical processes of VCC and CE, specifically through the theoretical mechanism of habitus.

Habitus acts as a customer value lens and provides a bridging concept to demonstrate how VCC and CE are joined via sensemaking processes. These processes determine how customers perceive, assess, and evaluate value, how they become engaged through VCC, and how their experience of engagement may lead to further VCC practice. The temporally bound experiences, states, and episodes are accumulated and aggregated through an enduring customer value lens comprised of habituated dispositions, interests, and attitudes.

This work responds to calls for research to strengthen the theoretical link between VCC and CE and to take account of customers' lived realities and their contextualized experiences. A key suggestion for future research is the use of a rope metaphor to stimulate thinking about the complex, temporally unfolding, and interrelated processes of VCC and CE.

The customer value lens and CE rope are introduced to simplify the complex, abstract, theoretical research on VCC and CE for a nonacademic audience. To understand how customers' value lenses are formed and change, and how a CE rope is strengthened, firms, service designers, and practitioners need to understand sensemaking processes through customer narratives and to use platforms and feedback to support and trigger sensemaking.

This paper provides a theoretical mechanism to explain the iterative and cyclical nature of VCC and CE processes and how accumulation and aggregation occur in these processes. In doing so, it demonstrates that CE occurs by virtue of, and is typified by, sensemaking processes that reproduce and shape a customer's habituated value lens, which perceives, assesses, and determines VCC and thus provides a basis for further customer engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of rhetorical and narrative strategies in the foundational text of Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic. The author argues that the success of Vargo and Lusch's (2004a) paper in establishing the foundational premises of the new S-D Logic is greatly aided by their persuasive use of classical rhetorical techniques of word choice, metaphor, and framing as well as the careful construction of a narrative that is guaranteed to be attractive to their audience.

The author uses techniques of rhetorical and narrative analysis to closely examine some of the principle argument in the foundational text of S-D Logic.

The author finds that Vargo and Lusch (2004a) make use of a powerful narrative of redemption in which marketing is seen to be saved from a potentially destructive internal struggle by a revelatory shift in perspective. The choice of key framing terms such as “logic”, “evolution”, and “paradigm” is found to have an important rhetorical effect in supporting this persuasive narrative and helping to cast it in a scientifically “inevitable” light.

The findings speak to the vital role played in academic marketing, and in the successful promulgation of a new movement within the academic marketing community, of persuasive language and narrative.

Smartphones have become ubiquitous devices that enable individuals to integrate digital resources in virtually all value co-creation processes, including visiting sport events. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to understand smartphone-enabled digital resource integration in the context of sport events from an individual intra-perspective. It thereby connects the perspectives of Service Dominant Logic and Experiential Computing.

A conceptual model was developed and empirically tested utilizing a survey of 707 visitors of eight first and second league soccer, handball and basketball matches in Germany. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results reveal that stadium visitors integrate sport event-related and unrelated digital resources to co-create value at sport events. While event-unrelated digital resources generally have more influence on visitors' perceived value, their importance is decreasing with higher team identification. Digital resources in the form of sports betting opportunities are only relevant in some specific contexts. Hence, both individual and contextual characteristics determine digital resource integration.

This study integrates the perspectives of value co-creation at sport events and experiential computing and proposes a conceptual model exploring how sport event visitors enrich their experience through the integration of sport event-related and unrelated smartphone-enabled digital resources. By illuminating the intra-level perspective of sport event visitors' resource integration, it provides the basis for future studies on digital resource integration on higher levels of aggregation including engagement platforms and entire sport event ecosystems.

The place branding process in cities and tourism destinations is usually steered by a central organization but in rural places, a focal actor often does not exist. The purpose of this paper is to identify which approaches to place branding processes are applied in different rural places. This is done by seeing the place branding process as a service ecosystem with focus on actor engagement.

A theoretical framework based on the concepts of service ecosystems and actor engagement is developed. This is then applied to analyse qualitative data collected through semi-structure interviews with participants from several Danish rural places.

The authors identify four different types of rural place branding processes along three dimensions: existence and type of a focal actor; type, extent and temporal properties of other actor groups’ engagement; and organization of the process, including its formalization, centralization and strategic focus. Type 1 is a highly formalized, centralized and strategically driven process under the leadership of a public authority. The other types are community-based approaches. Type 2 is formalized, centralized and strategically driven process. Type 3 is less formalized but also centralized and strategically focused. Type 4 is a non-formalized, decentralized process with ad hoc initiatives.

This paper applies a service marketing-based framework to analyse qualitative empirical data from different cases of rural places and identify different place branding processes.