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This study examines the dualities of digital services – that is, how customers’ favorite everyday digital services can positively and negatively contribute to their well-being. Thus, the study describes the meanings of favorite digital services as part of customers’ everyday lives and the types of well-being to which such services can contribute.

We used a qualitative research approach through semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021 to collect data from 14 young adults (22–31 years old) who actively used digital services in their daily lives.

Our findings revealed that customers’ favorite everyday digital services can contribute to their mental well-being, social well-being, and intellectual well-being. Within these three dimensions of well-being, we identified nine dualities of digital services that describe their positive and negative contributions: (1) digital escapism versus digital disruption, (2) digital relaxation versus digital stress, (3) digital empowerment versus digital subjugation, (4) digital augmentation versus digital emptiness, (5) digital socialization versus digital isolation, (6) digital togetherness versus digital exclusion, (7) digital self-expression versus digital pressure, (8) digital learning versus digital dependence, and (9) digital inspiration versus digital stagnation.

These findings suggest that everyday digital services have the potential to contribute to customer well-being in various aspects – both positively and negatively – accentuating the need for service providers to decipher the impacts of their offerings on well-being. Indeed, understanding the relationship between digital services and customer well-being can help companies tailor their services to customers’ needs. Companies that prioritize customer well-being not only benefit their customers but also create sustainable growth opportunities in the long run. Further, companies can use the derived information in service design to develop marketing strategies that emphasize the positive impacts of their digital services on customer well-being.

Although prior transformative service studies have investigated the well-being of multiple stakeholders, such studies have focused on services related to the physical and healthcare domains. Consequently, the role of everyday digital services as contributors to customer well-being is an under-researched topic. In addition, the concept of well-being and its various dimensions has received limited attention in previous service research. By investigating everyday digital services and their multidimensional contribution to customer well-being, this study broadens the perspective on well-being within TSR and aids in refining a more precise conceptualization.

People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.

Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.

This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role.

This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.

This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.

This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.

The market for luxury is growing rapidly. While there is a significant body of literature on luxury goods, academic research has largely ignored luxury services. The purpose of this article is to open luxury services as a new field of investigation by developing the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings to build the luxury services literature and show how luxury services differ from both luxury goods and from ordinary (i.e. non-luxury) services.

This paper uses a conceptual approach drawing upon and synthesizing the luxury goods and services marketing literature.

This article makes three contributions. First, it shows that services are largely missing from the luxury literature, just as the field of luxury is mostly missing from the service literature. Second, it contrasts the key characteristics of services and related consumer behaviors with luxury goods. The service characteristics examined are non-ownership, IHIP (i.e. intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability), the three additional Ps of services marketing (i.e. people, processes, and physical facilities) and the three-stage service consumption model. This article derives implications these characteristics have on luxury. For example, non-ownership increases the importance of psychological ownership, reduces the importance of conspicuous consumption and the risk of counterfeiting. Third, this article defines luxury services as extraordinary hedonic experiences that are exclusive whereby exclusivity can be monetary, social and hedonic in nature, and luxuriousness is jointly determined by objective service features and subjective customer perceptions. Together, these characteristics place a service on a continuum ranging from everyday luxury to elite luxury.

This article provides suggestions on how firms can enhance psychological ownership of luxury services, manage conspicuous consumption, and use more effectively luxury services' additional types of exclusivity (i.e. social and hedonic exclusivity).

This is the first paper to define luxury services and their characteristics, to apply and link frameworks from the service literature to luxury, and to derive consumer insights from these for research and practice.

This article describes the test of a method for consulting frail older people about the quality of social services and their unmet needs. The method, home interviews by senior social services managers, was prompted by advice from older social services clients about how best to obtain their views. Results of the interview programme are presented, together with benefits arising specifically from using managers as interviewers and discussion of future application of this approach.

This paper aims to analyze the well-being consequences of value co-creation activities at an ecosystem level, focusing specifically on the micro and meso levels. This study is performed in a retail ecosystem, a highly relevant context where individuals spend a considerable amount of time and resources, but where well-being is usually not deemed as a relevant outcome.

The investigation analyzes qualitative data from micro and meso level actors of a retail ecosystem. At the micro-level, in-depth interviews performed with customers, employees and suppliers were assessed. The meso level analysis included most of the actors embedded in the retail ecosystem: employees’ headquarters, suppliers’ headquarters, nearby competitors, family, other retail outlets and external employees.

This study is one of the first in the transformative service research area to analyze well-being from a retail ecosystem perspective. Hence, this analysis broadens the literature on transformative service by considering supermarket retailing, an everyday service context that is not assumed to generate well-being outcomes. Results reveal that actors who spend more time or have fewer options available for them in the retail ecosystem see their well-being deeply affected. It also extends the conceptualization of value co-creation to a retail ecosystem, a specific ecosystem, which differs from previous studies that focus mostly on health-care ecosystems.

Although useful to understand new insights, a limitation of this investigation is that it is based upon a single qualitative study.

The study portrays how activities happening within a business context have consequences beyond traditional measures such as loyalty or turn-over. It proposes specific value co-creation actions to be performed by employees, suppliers and customers to promote positive well-being consequences for the micro and meso level retail ecosystem.

Retail ecosystems are usually not deemed as relevant when trying to understand societal well-being outcomes. This study empirically depicts that all services, even the ones without transformative goals, need to be aware of the impact they have on societal well-being.

This paper provides a novel conceptualization of well-being effects in a retail ecosystem. Specifically, this is the first study in the transformative service research literature to identify the micro and meso level well-being consequences of value co-creation activities within a retail ecosystem.

Policymakers push online health services delivery, relying on consumers to independently engage with online services. Yet, a growing cluster of vulnerable patients do not engage with or disengage from these innovative services. There is a need to understand how to resolve the tension between the push of online health service provision and unengagement by a contingent of health-care consumers. Thus, this study aims to explore the issue of digital unengagement (DU) (i.e. the active or passive choice to engage or disengage) with online health services to better inform service design aligned to actual consumer need.

Adopting a survey methodology, a group of 486 health services consumers with a self-declared (acute or chronic) condition were identified. Of this group, 110 consumers were classified as digitally unengaged and invited to write open-ended narratives about their unengagement with online health services. As a robustness check, these drivers were contrasted with the drivers identified by a group of digitally engaged consumers with a self-declared condition (n = 376).

DU is conceptualized, and four levels of DU drivers are identified. These levels represent families of interrelated drivers that in combination shape DU: subjective incompatibility (misalignment of online services with need, lifestyle and alternative services); enactment vulnerability (personal vulnerabilities around control, comprehension and emotional management of online services); sharing essentiality (centrality of face-to-face co-creation opportunities plus conflicting social dependencies); and strategic scepticism (scepticism of the strategic value of online services). Identified challenges at each level are the mechanisms through which drivers impact on DU. These DU drivers are distinct from those of the digitally engaged group.

Adding to a nascent but growing literature on consumer unengagement, and complementing the engagement literature, the authors conceptualize DU, positioning it as distinct from, not simply a lack of, consumer engagement. The authors explore the drivers of DU to provide insight into how DU occurs. Encapsulating the dynamic nature of DU, these drivers map the building blocks that could help to address the issue of aligning the push of online service provision with the pull from consumers.

This paper offers insights on how to encourage consumers to engage with online health services by uncovering the drivers of DU that, typically, are hidden from service designers and providers impacting provision and uptake.

There is a concern that there will be an unintentional disenfranchisement of vulnerable segments of society with a generic policy emphasis on pushing online services. The paper sheds light on the unforeseen personal and social issues that lead to disenfranchisement by giving voice to digitally unengaged consumers with online health services.

Offering a novel view from a hard-to-reach digitally unengaged group, the conceptualization of DU, identified drivers and challenges inform policymakers and practitioners on how to facilitate online health service (re)engagement and prevent marginalization of segments of society.

The paper aims to conceptualize how behavioral shifts in times of crisis drive the transformation of value co-creation.

Referencing two empirical contexts, the paper explores how digital service platforms facilitate changes in actors’ mental models and institutional arrangements (legal, social, technological) that drive transformation of value co-creation in service ecosystems.

The proposed conceptual framework contributes to existing research by identifying micro-level changes in actors’ mental models and macro-level changes in institutional arrangements enabled by digital service platforms in service ecosystems. In particular, the framework identifies motivation, agility and resistance as moderators of behavioral shifts in times of crisis. This account offers a finer-grained theorization of the moderating factors and underlying mechanisms of service ecosystem transformation but does not extend to the ensuing “new normal.”

The proposed framework indicates how digital platforms support shifts in actors’ behavior and contribute to the transformation of value co-creation. While the enablers are situation-specific and may therefore vary according to the prevailing conditions, the actor-related concepts advanced here seem likely to remain relevant when analyzing the transformation of value co-creation in other crisis situations.

The new conceptual framework advanced here clarifies how behavioral shifts during a crisis drive the transformation of value co-creation and suggests directions for future research.

This article is based on an empirical study and describes an approach for managing customer expectations to achieve long‐term quality and customer satisfaction in professional services. Professional services are somewhat different from other types of services, and often so are customer expectations. This article describes three types of expectations typical in the professional services context: fuzzy, implicit, and unrealistic. These types of expectations may represent a dangerous pitfall for long‐lasting customer satisfaction. Managing expectations is important since service quality and satisfaction result from how well the actual service performance, in other words the service process and outcome, matches the expectations. Much can be done to achieve long‐lasting satisfaction with sophisticated expectations management. This article suggests that making fuzzy expectations precise, implicit expectations explicit, and unrealistic expectations realistic, facilitates long‐term quality and customer satisfaction. The expectations‐management approach introduced in this article is particularly important when the goal is to create long‐term customer relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to further clarify the link between the theoretical and practical/real-life implications of a seminal topic in the strategic operations management field: Wickham Skinner’s strategic trade-offs model. This will help researchers, practitioners and students to realize the “everyday life” consequences of this highly influential model.

A theoretical analysis is made of previous research dealing with the strategic trade-offs model. Building on these investigations, a Popperian approach is used to logically develop the model, and the authors demonstrate how it can be empirically tested.

Previous investigations on Skinner’s model mainly focus on trade-offs between competitive capabilities (e.g. cost, quality, delivery) at the firm level. This paper demonstrates that the implications of this model necessarily should include consideration of the strategic trade-offs between the competitive characteristics of products/services that practitioners, students and the general public can observe.

While previous investigations have provided necessary clarifications, no paper has addressed the issue of the existence of strategic trade-offs between the competitive characteristics of products/services. This paper offers guidelines for researchers and practitioners on the way that the strategic trade-offs model can be conceptualized, understood and tested.

In the discussion on service‐dominant logic and its consequences for value creation and marketing the inner meaning of the value‐in‐use notion and the nature of service marketing have not been considered thoroughly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the meaning of a service logic as a logic for consumption and provision, respectively, and explore the consequences for value creation and marketing.

Being a research‐based paper, the topic is approached by theoretical analysis and conceptual development.

Discussing the differences between value‐in‐exchange and value‐in‐use, the paper concludes that value‐in‐exchange in essence concerns resources used as a value foundation which are aimed at facilitating customers' fulfilment of value‐in‐use. When accepting value‐in‐use as a foundational value creation concept customers are the value creators. Adopting a service logic makes it possible for firms to get involved with their customers' value‐generating processes, and the market offering is expanded to including firm‐customer interactions. In this way, the supplier can become a co‐creator of value with its customers. Drawing on the analysis, ten concluding service logic propositions are put forward.

The analysis provides a foundation for further development of a service logic for customers and suppliers, respectively, (“service logic” is preferred over the normally used “service‐dominant logic”) as well for further analysis of the marketing consequences of adopting such a business and marketing logic.

Marketing practitioners will find new ways of understanding customers' value creation and of developing marketing strategies with an aim to engage suppliers with their customers' consumption processes in order to enhance customer satisfaction.

For a scholarly audience, the paper provides a more truly service‐centric understanding of value creation and of its marketing consequences. For a practitioner audience, it offers service‐based means of further developing marketing practices.