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Disruptive shocks significantly compromise service contexts, challenging multidimensional value (co)creation. Recent focus has been on consumers experiencing vulnerability in service contexts. However, the susceptibility of service firms, employees and other actors to the impacts of disruptive shocks has received little attention. Since resource scarcity from disruptive shocks heightens tensions around balancing different needs in the service system, this paper aims to propose a framework of balanced centricity and service system resilience for service sustainability.

Adopting a conceptual model process, the paper integrates resilience and balanced centricity (method theories) with customer/consumer vulnerability (domain theory) resulting in a definition of multiactor vulnerability and related theoretical propositions.

Depleted, unavailable, or competed over resources among multiple actors constrain resource integration. Disruptive shocks nevertheless have upside potential. The interdependencies of actors in the service system call for deeper examination of multiple parties’ susceptibility to disruptive resource scarcity. The conceptual framework integrates multiactor vulnerability (when multiactor susceptibility to resource scarcity challenges value exchange) with processes of service system resilience, developing three research propositions. Emerging research questions and strategies for balanced centricity provide a research agenda.

A multiactor, balanced centricity perspective extends understanding of value cocreation, service resilience and service sustainability. Strategies for anticipating, coping with and adapting to disruptions in service systems are suggested by using the balanced centricity perspective, offering the potential to maintain (or enhance) the six types of value.

This research defines multiactor vulnerability, extending work on experienced vulnerabilities; describes the multilevel and multiactor perspective on experienced vulnerability in service relationships; and conceptualizes how balanced centricity can decrease multiactor vulnerability and increase service system resilience when mega disruptions occur.

This research blends perspectives of the Eastern phenomenon of guanxi with the more Western perspectives of relationship marketing and customer centricity. Extending scholarship on guanxi in marketing (e.g. Park and Luo, 2001; Sheu and Hu, 2009; Luo et al., 2008; Fowler and Reisenwitz, 2014), the objective is to highlight the indirect role of customer centricity (i.e. how visible or central it is for the business partner to communicate with/have information sharing with), for firms in regions with a prevalence of guanxi.

The empirical model is tested in context of global marketing in the business-to-business (B2B) logistics industry (n = 508). A total of 508 global logistics employees and managers with experience in global business participated in the survey in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis with multi-group analyses.

Customer centricity intensifies positive outcomes of guanxi prevalence. Specifically, a high level of customer centricity strengthens established associations among guanxi prevalence, trust, relationship commitment and firm performance.

While most work on guanxi has a focus in China, this research focuses on Taiwan. While building on a wealth of literature, relatively less work has focused on customer centricity.

This research explores the mediating role of a firm's innovativeness and customer orientation on the relationship between commercial success and total quality management (TQM) in the Indian SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) sector.

The hypotheses suggested for this study were validated using partial least squares-based structural equation modeling on data collected from 189 executives working in SaaS companies in India.

The findings of this study revealed that a SaaS company's innovativeness fully mediates the relationship between TQM and corporate performance, whereas the customer orientation of SaaS companies partially mediates the relationship between TQM and corporate performance.

Findings of this paper indicate that, in addition to TQM deployment, SaaS companies' innovativeness and customer-focused strategy will improve their corporate performance. With minimal research focusing on India, this study may be considered a pioneer work. It can serve as a basis for SaaS company promoters to improve their corporate performance by implementing TQM processes.

With Sweden and Europe and the present and the future as vantage points, the purpose of this paper is to challenge the viability of customer centricity (or customer orientation) and its axiom, the marketing concept, as the basis for marketing and profitability.

The paper is part of a project in Sweden to stimulate a dialogue on the importance and role of marketing. As such the paper draws on the author's experience as professor, practicing marketer, consumer and citizen and expresses a personal and unorthodox synthesis of ongoing developments in marketing.

Although customer orientation has been on the agenda for at least half a century it is not whole‐heartedly implemented. The reason may be that it is unrealistic as a general guideline for marketing. First, a single stakeholder can only in special instances be treated as the nucleus of marketing and business; a tradeoff between several stakeholders – “balanced centricity” – stands out as more realistic. Second, the gullibility of human nature and the customer's limited knowledge and time open up for the deployment of diverse tricks in marketing practice. The current evolution of marketing theory and the advent of better methodology to handle complexity could be a step forward once the marketing discipline embraces it fully. Gaps between what marketing textbooks prescribe and the real world confronting marketers need to be narrowed.

Just focusing on the customer and customer satisfaction is not possible in practice; businesses have to balance the interests of many stakeholders, thus balanced centricity.

Customer centricity is hardly ever challenged in the research literature and textbooks and its strategic value is often not understood and accepted in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the antecedents and outcomes of internal service quality (ISQ) in a health-care environment. The relationships among the heterogeneous health-care environment, coordinated care, perceived organisational support (POS), ISQ, internal customer satisfaction and patient-centred care were explored.

Based on a review of the literature, a structural model was developed. A 37-item questionnaire was circulated among service providers in the health-care system, including doctors, nurses and system staff, all over India. The random sampling method was adopted to collect data. A total of 238 valid responses were received. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The results show that the heterogeneous environment, coordinated care and POS act as antecedents of ISQ, which drives internal customer satisfaction and patient centricity in health care.

The paper contributes to the health-care literature by identifying the antecedents and consequences of ISQ and developing a structural relationship among ISQ, the heterogeneous health-care environment, coordinated care, POS, internal customer satisfaction and patient-centred care.

Hospital administrators may use various constructs of POS, ISQ and coordinated care to measure process and employee performance, which may aid the design of appropriate processes and improve employee selection. The constructs of patient centricity and internal customer satisfaction may be used as benchmarking tools to facilitate the formulation of immediate corrective actions and policies for future courses of action.

This paper highlights how patient centricity may be achieved by focussing on ISQ, coordinated care processes and a facilitative internal environment. This understanding may aid the design of processes that in turn deliver health as a social good in an effective manner.

This paper extends past research on ISQ by showing that ISQ affects internal customer satisfaction and, in turn, the quality of service delivery in the system. In the health-care context, heterogeneity in patient needs, coordinated care and organisational support play crucial roles in determining ISQ, which in turn influences the level of patient-centred care.

By fusing knowledge-based theory, organizational learning theory and dynamics capability theory, this study aims to explore, on the one hand, the linkage between exploration, sensing and tacit knowledge, and on the other hand, exploitation, seizing and explicit knowledge. Thereby, it argues that not only tacit knowledge but also explicit knowledge contributes to competitive advantage for firms. This study also investigates how knowledge transforms into profitability.

The conceptual model is tested with a study sample of 153 industrial organizations using structural equation modelling.

Results confirm the importance of both tacit and explicit knowledge for achieving sustainable competitive advantages. Furthermore, both tacit and explicit knowledge transform into profitability, both directly and through product innovation and customer centricity which play partial mediating roles.

Explicit knowledge strategies can be easier to manage, implement and institutionalize than tacit knowledge strategies, which require human component and intervention to succeed. Managers should hence first implement explicit knowledge strategies to gain expeditious results. Further, with the advent of digital technologies and algorithms that can extract deep customer insights and organizational experiences which are highly tacit in nature and codifying the same into explicit knowledge, the importance of explicit knowledge is further enlarged.

By fusing three adjacent theories to establish a robust model specification, this study is able to demonstrate the contribution of explicit knowledge in the firm’s competitive advantages.

This paper aims to analyze the present status of customer support services (CSS) and advocate the re-positioning of support services from an administrative cost center to a strategic profit center. Authors demonstrate how customer support or after sales services can be a source of competitive advantage and revenue generation for firms.

The study adopts a conceptual approach grounded in theoretical foundations of service dominant logic, customer loyalty and customer centricity along with practical illustrations from the industry.

Following the tenets of theory, review of existing research and analysis of the industry practices, the authors propose a new framework to enable the repositioning of customer service function. The key propositions include establishing customer support as separate business unit and insights center, introducing a new role of a C-level chief customer support officer to lead the customer support unit, adopting a customer-centric culture and process, enabling frontline IT support and investing in frontline employee skills development.

Academics should examine the potential of customer support, where the strategic importance is low at present, leading to customer dissatisfaction. The new approach and positioning of customer support calls for a new direction for research in this area focusing on enablers, challenges and further implications. To succeed in this competitive era, firms should be conscious of the value of customer service and undertake concrete actions to generate value for all stakeholders.

Industry can use the new framework and re-position CSS of the organizations. The CSS unit can be different from other business units in the organizations. The CSS would evolve and emerge from the live customer insights. CSS unit can be managed by the C level chief CSS officer. Customer-centric culture would be developed and front line processes can be made customer-oriented by the officer. Thus, this paper and framework would provide new customer-centric directions to the organizations for effective functioning.

This is the original piece that has emerged from the experience and expertise of the authors.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the structures of the relationships between actors in the creative industries sector using crowd-funding, and how co-creation is the basis for reaching balanced centricity in the creative industries.

The Many-to-Many Marketing Theory, Service-Dominant Logic and Service Logic are the theoretical bases for explaining how the changing roles of the actors in the creative industries sector have given the crowd a great capacity for deciding in the value-creation process. A qualitative, case-based approach is used, given the complexity of the phenomenon to be analysed.

The findings of the empirical approach have important theoretical and practical implications. On the theoretical side, it analyses the importance of balanced centricity instead of customer centricity as the basis for system stability. Findings also have implications for service managers, as this can be considered an alternative for certain business projects, especially in the creative industries sector, where a growing demand is identified, not only as a method of financing, but also as a strategy for strengthening the bond with customers.

The study has implications for practitioners and scholars. With respect to managers, the “balanced centricity in cultural crowd-funding” model constitutes a significant contribution, because it replaces the prominent position which until now has been enjoyed by the consumer, with the overall balance of the system, in other words, with aiming to benefit all agents. This translates into a change in how strategies are understood and applied in organisations, as in every decision organisations will have to keep in mind the implications that their decisions and actions have on the rest of the agents, with the objective of managing to exploit their “strategic potential”. Strategic planning actions are identified.

This paper is the first to analyse balanced centricity as the basis for system stability in the creative industries. The new tasks of the customer as a selector and financer of projects increase the roles assigned to the co-creation concept and improve the knowledge of Network Theory for the creative industries.

Customer, product and brand (CPB) management constitute relevant and inextricably linked levels of decision-making that marketers should manage to drive business success. However, they are generally treated separately in extant research. It leads to a disconnected assessment and management of customers and products/brands, preventing marketers to take advantage of the positive implications of managing them simultaneously. This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework to unify these perspectives: the CPB bottom-up approach.

The paper draws on a range of extant literature on customer equity, brand equity and product performance to identify how financial performance is assessed in each of these perspectives and support the conceptual proposition to unify these different levels of decisions-making.

The proposed framework allows predicting and managing the expected values of these three intertwined perspectives together, providing a unified forward-looking metric to more effectively drive marketing efforts.

The proposed framework opens the path for future discussion concerning possible models that can be adopted to implement it.

The proposed framework allows managers to make decisions having a holistic assessment of CPB performance.

In practice, marketing managers have to deal with brand and product as well as customer levels of decision-making simultaneously. Besides this, adopting customer centricity does not decrease the importance of managing the performance of brands and products. Therefore, the proposition of a solution able to bridge the gap between these levels of decision-making enhances both the marketing practice and literature.

A gestão de clientes, produtos e marcas constituem níveis relevantes e interrelacionados de tomada de decisão que os profissionais de marketing devem gerenciar para impulsionar o sucesso dos negócios. No entanto, eles são geralmente tratados separadamente na literatura. Isso leva a uma avaliação e gestão desconectada de clientes e produtos/marcas, impedindo os profissionais de marketing de aproveitar as implicações positivas de gerenciá-los simultaneamente. Neste artigo, propomos uma estrutura conceitual para unificar essas perspectivas: a abordagem bottom-up de cliente, produto e marca.

O artigo sustenta-se em uma variedade de pesquisas passadas sobre valor do cliente, valor da marca e desempenho do produto para identificar como o desempenho financeiro é avaliado em cada uma dessas perspectivas e apoiar a proposta conceitual para unificar esses diferentes níveis de tomada de decisão.

A estrutura proposta permite prever e gerenciar os valores esperados dessas três perspectivas interligadas, fornecendo uma métrica preditiva unificada para impulsionar os esforços de marketing de forma mais eficaz.

A estrutura proposta abre caminho para futuras discussões sobre possíveis modelos que podem ser adotados para implementá-lo.

A estrutura proposta permite que os gerentes tomem decisões com uma avaliação holística do desempenho do cliente, do produto e da marca.

Na prática, os gerentes de marketing precisam lidar simultaneamente com os níveis de tomada de decisão de marca e de produto, bem como de clientes. Além disso, adotar foco no cliente não diminui a importância de gerenciar o desempenho de marcas e produtos. Portanto, a proposição de uma solução capaz de preencher a lacuna entre esses níveis de tomada de decisão aprimora tanto a prática de marketing quanto a literatura.

The study aims to provide an exploratory investigation of the magnitude of the customer-centric approach in the specific area of healthcare as a contribution to the scarce and preliminary literature on this topic. In particular, it explores the role of sharing economy-based (SE-based) platforms as an experiential touchpoint to co-create value within different levels. Specifically, the purpose of the study is threefold. First, it aims to address the service experience innovation in healthcare with a customer-centric approach. Second, it seeks to define the role of the SE-based platform as a touchpoint to redefine business processes, and third, it measures the co-created value within the network when redesigning the service experience.

To address the research question, the authors proposed an analysis of service innovation and customer centricity in healthcare networks by using the case study of Saluber, an SE-based platform that offers logistics services for non-emergency medical transportation in the Campania region (south of Italy). By using a qualitative approach, the authors analysed primary and secondary data from multiple sources of evidence.

The results show that a customer-centric approach based on the SE-based platform can improve the customer experience and help to redesign and expand the business processes of healthcare organisations. A multilevel model demonstrates the possible service innovations that use SE principles that can co-create value for the customer (micro level), for the healthcare network (meso level) and for the community (macro-level).

This study provides managerial implications for the players who intend to take advantage of the possibilities offered by service innovations developed by the health and social organisations in the network. The SE-based platform helps redefine business processes to improve clinical and financial outcomes and improves the overall customer experience within this network.

This study allows new and important reflections from ethical, social and managerial points of view and underlines how digital platforms act as a support for healthcare services, not as a substitute.