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This paper aims to present the literature review on engagement in marketing, specifically on the concept of actor engagement (AE), to identify the most influential countries, authors, journals and institutions, their structure and research lines.

This review was carried out from a bibliometric and network analysis of documents published in the Scopus and Web of Science databases.

A total of 223 documents were found that were scientifically mapped in this field. The network analysis identified four perspectives or research clusters: customer engagement, the conceptualization, co-creation of value and service ecosystems. Finally, the agenda for future research is presented.

This paper carries out a bibliometric and network analysis, so far not done, of the literature on AE in which its perspectives and future lines of research were identified.

The purpose of this paper is to examine customers’ use experiences in a smartphone application (app) context. Apps have emerged as popular tools among marketing practitioners. In service research, however, smartphone apps, and their customers’ use experiences, have received limited attention.

This paper provides a conceptual overview and draws on an empirical two-phase study comprising diary narratives of using a specific app and semi-structured interviews on the use of multiple apps by app users.

Results show that indirect use experiences play an important role in the holistic service experience. Compared with direct experiences, indirect use experiences do not require the actual use of apps or direct contact with the user. Also the context, such as the time and location of app use, is important for both direct and indirect use experience.

This paper highlights indirect use experiences as a vital component of service experiences and encourages researchers not to restrict use experiences to direct use only. Indirect use experiences enable managers to gain deep insights into the everyday use experiences of current and potential customers.

First, previous research on service experience has mainly focused on direct use experiences. This study highlights that indirect use experiences are an important part of the service experience. Second, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first attempt to investigate the use experiences of smartphone apps in a service marketing context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social and cultural aspects of the context that frames service exchange to better understand how value and experience are evaluated.

The authors apply a conceptual approach to develop and propose a framework for deepening the understanding of the context of market-related experiences. The authors integrate two growing streams of research – consumer culture theory and service-dominant logic – that focus on phenomenological and experiential views on value and extend the context of experience with a culturally rich, service-ecosystems view of markets.

The authors broaden the context of experience by applying a service-ecosystems perspective and identify four social and cultural factors that influence experience from this extended context – sign systems and service ecosystems; multiplicity of structure and institutions; value-in-cultural-context; and co-construction of context. Based on this, the authors point toward directions for future research.

The proposed framework points researchers and managers toward an extended context that is reproduced through the co-creation of value and influences evaluations of experience. Empirical research is needed to provide evidence of the proposed framework and further extend the understanding of dynamic social and cultural contexts.

The findings of this study provide a broader scope of context and identify additional social and cultural factors for managers to consider in their efforts to enhance customer experiences.

Traditional views of markets limit the context of experience to firm-customer encounters or consumer-centric practices and processes. This paper extends the context of experience to consider the practices and perspectives of multiple actors and various views on value.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to introduce a practice-based framework designed to integrate and deepen our understanding of how individuals co-create service experience practices; to identify co-creating service experience practices; and to provide a compelling agenda for future research, and offer practical strategies to enhance co-created service experiences. Accordingly, we extend practice theory, building on Kjellberg and Helgesson’s (2006) practice-based framework for markets by integrating Holt’s (1995) consumer practices and social capital-based practices (Gittell and Vidal, 1998; Woolcock, 2001).

The authors interpretive analysis draws on naturalistic observations carried out over 18 months, supplemented with 35 interviews (17 with residents, and 18 with staff) and a diary study of nine non-management staff (including nursing staff, kitchen and cleaning staff and administrative staff) at a residential aged care facility.

This paper offers a new conceptualization of service experience. Rather than viewing service experiences as dyadic, designed and produced by the firm for the customer, the authors conceptualize service experience as dynamic, experiential, relational activities and interactions, thus highlighting the collective, collaborative, evolving and dynamic nature of service experience.

Building on McColl-Kennedy et al.’s (2012) foundational work, the authors articulate three distinct types of practices that characterize service experiences. We extend practice theory offering an integrative practice-based framework consistent with our practice-based conceptualization of service experience. Based on the service ecosystem metaphor and drawing parallels and contrasts with an ant colony, the authors provide a co-created service experience practices (CSEP) framework comprising: representational practices – assimilating, producing and personalizing; normalizing practices – bonding, bridging and linking; and exchange practices – accounting (searching and selecting), evaluating (sorting and assorting), appreciating, classifying (displaying objects and demonstrating collective action, and play (communing and entertaining). Our CSEP framework integrates three theoretical frameworks, that of Kjellberg and Helgesson’s (2006) market practices framework, Holt’s (1995) consumer practices and social capital-based practices (Gittell and Vidal, 1998; Woolcock, 2001), to yield a deeper explanation of co-created service experience practices.

It is clear from our observations, interviews with residents and staff, and from the diary study, that customers co-create service experiences in many different ways, each contextually determined. In some cases the customers are well equipped with a wide array of resources, integrated from exchanges with other customers, staff, friends and family and from their own resources. In other cases, however, few resources are integrated from few sources. Importantly, the authors found that some staff are willing and able to offer an extensive range of resources designed to complement the customers’ own resources to help facilitate the service experience. We offer a seven-point practical plan designed to enhance service experiences.

The authors work contributes theoretically and practically in four important ways. First, the authors provide a critical analysis of prior service experience conceptualizations. Second, consistent with the conceptualization that service experiences are dynamic, experiential, relational activities and interactions developed with the customer and potentially other actors, including for example, other customers, organizations, and friends and family, we draw parallels and contrasts with a biological ecosystem and offer a co-created service experience practices (CSEP) framework designed to integrate and deepen the understanding of co-created service experiences and extend practice theory. Third, the authors provide managerial implications, including a seven-point practical plan. Finally, the authors offer a research agenda to assist further theory development.

The purpose of this paper is to identify which consumption practices lead to the co-creation of collective service experiences and to outline a conceptual framework for their understanding.

The authors use a multiple case vignette approach combining examples from leisure industries described as perfect contexts to study collective experiences. Four case vignettes were selected according to community forms and types as defined by consumer culture literature.

The study identifies and delineates the neglected phenomenon of the co-creation of collective service experiences and related practices. It highlights the ambivalence of these practices in terms of the co-creation or co-destruction of the experience and indicates their relative unmanageability.

The cases largely rest on symbolic service experiences, which are a small set of the total universe of consumer experiences.

Companies should replace their efforts in organizing consumer practices with monitoring mechanisms and react to collective consumer actions, pursuing a co-evolutionary perspective when they do not have a dominant and permanent role in the relationship with their consumers.

The paper gives voice to an understudied collective phenomenon in service management and provides the building blocks for its conceptualization.

Companies increasingly opt for co-creation by engaging customers in new product and service development processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the customer experience in co-creation situations and its determinants.

The conceptual framework addresses the customer experience in co-creation situations, and its individual and environmental determinants. To examine the degree to which these determinants affect the customer experience in co-creation situations, the author starts by proposing and testing a multidimensional co-creation experience scale (n=66). Next, the author employs an experiment to test the hypotheses (n=180).

Higher levels of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity positively affect different co-creation experience dimensions. The impact of these dimensions on the overall co-creation experience, however, differs according to customers’ expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Therefore, the author concludes that the expected co-creation benefits determine the importance of the level of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity for the co-creation experience.

This research generates a better understanding of the co-creation experience by providing insight into the co-creation experience dimensions and their relative importance for customers with different expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Additionally, this research addresses the implications of customer heterogeneity in terms of expected co-creation benefits for designing co-creation environments, thereby helping managers to generate more rewarding co-creation experiences for their customers.

This paper aims to explore how companies access resources through network relationships when developing service innovations. The paper identifies the types of resource that companies seek from other actors and examines the nature of relationships and resource access strategies that can be applied to access each type of resource.

A longitudinal, multi-case study is conducted in the field of technical business-to-business (b-to-b) services. An abductive research strategy is applied to create a new theoretical understanding of resource access.

Companies seek a range of resources through different types of network relationships for service innovation. Four types of resource access strategies were identified: absorption, acquisition, sharing, and co-creation. The findings show how easily transferable resources can be accessed through weak relationships and low-intensity collaboration. Access to resources that are difficult to transfer, instead, necessitates strong relationships and high-intensity collaboration.

The findings are valid for technical b-to-b services, but should also be tested for other kinds of innovations. Future research should also study how actors integrate the resources gained through networks in the innovation process.

Managers should note that key resources for service innovation may be accessible through a variety of actors and relationships ranging from formal arrangements to miscellaneous social contacts. To make use of tacit resources such as knowledge, firms need to engage in intensive collaboration.

Despite attention paid to network relationships, innovation collaboration, and external resources, previous research has neither linked these issues nor studied their mutual contingencies. This paper provides a theoretical model that characterizes the service innovation resources accessible through different types of relationships and access strategies.

The business-to-business (B2B) marketing literature is heavily focused on the manufacturing sector. However, it is the B2B service sector that shows the highest growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Beyond a vibrant stream of literature on servitization, the B2B literature has neglected drawing on the wider service literature. This paper aims to examine recent streams of service research that have promising implications and research opportunities for B2B marketing.

Together, the author team has decades of research, managerial and executive teaching experience related to B2B marketing and services marketing and management. The observations and reflections in this paper originate from this unique perspective and are supplemented by insights from 16 expert interviews.

The authors identify and discuss in this paper four broad and related themes from the service literature that can stimulate B2B research and practice. First, the authors highlight the implications for capturing value in economies with their rapidly increasing specialization and related growth in B2B services. Specifically, the authors explain where B2B firms should focus on to gain bargaining power in the value chains of the future. Second, an additional strategy to enhance a B2B firm’s power to capture value is servitization, which allows firms to get closer to their customers, increase their switching costs and build strategic partnerships. The authors explore how firms can use service productization to enhance their chances of successful servitization. Third, servitization is expensive, and productivity and scalability are often a challenge in B2B contexts. These issues are tackled in a recent service research stream on cost-effective service excellence (CESE) where the authors derive implications for B2B firms. Fourth and related to CESE, latest developments in intelligent automation offer exciting opportunities for B2B services to be made more scalable.

This paper is based on the unique perspective of the author team and a panel of experts and connects major streams of service research to the B2B literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore enhancing theory development in service research and provide an overview of the five essays on theorizing initiated by the International Network for Service Research workshop, held at Karlstad, Sweden in September 2014.

A collaborative theorizing process which was initiated at the Karlstad, Sweden workshop.

Six (five from the event and the introduction) original and provocative essays that explore different aspects of theorizing in service research.

Exploring how a collaborative approach to research can be used.