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Few empirical studies have been conducted to explore the mechanisms and drivers of service exchange and value co‐creation. In particular, no study has compared a service system design informed by service‐dominant logic (SDL) with a service system design informed by goods‐dominant logic (GDL). The purpose of this paper is to address this knowledge gap. The research question is: does a service‐dominant system design result in a more favourable customer experience than a goods‐dominant service system?

An experiment was carried out on a group of habitual bus travellers. The subjects were asked to plan a specific journey using two online journey planning systems. Two hypotheses were tested: first, an SDL informed service system will evoke a better overall customer experience than a GDL informed service system. Second, this better customer experience arises out of seven service system design characteristics. Both objective and subjective data were gathered to compare the customers' experiences of using the two service systems.

The results show that a service‐dominant service system outperforms a goods‐dominant service system in terms of both objective and subjective criteria. Moreover, the experiment elucidates the subjects' perceived importance of the characteristics of a service‐dominant service system. Analysis of the subjects' perception of the two service systems reveals that certain characteristics set the service‐dominant service system more distinctly apart from the goods‐dominant one.

The paper contributes by extending the empirical foundation for service‐dominant logic, providing new knowledge on value co‐creation and design characteristics of service systems, and identifying the most important service system characteristics perceived by the customer.

The purpose of this study is to develop a service logic oriented framework for business model development. “Service logic” covers the basic principles of the three contemporary customer value focused business logics: service-dominant logic, service logic and customer-dominant logic.

This study is based on an empirical qualitative research and deployed the focus group method. The data are generated in a series of interactive co-creative focus group workshops involving both practitioners and academics.

As the outcome, a new tool was developed, called Service Logic Business Model Canvas. The new canvas is a modified version of the original Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010).

This study adopts service logic in business model thinking and increases knowledge on how to keep the customer needs in the centre of business model development.

The developed canvas makes the theory of service-dominant logic tangible and easily applicable in practice. It enables service innovation truly based on customer value by ensuring that the customer is in the centre of all the elements of a business model. It can function both as a rapid prototype of a new business model and as a communication tool that quickly illustrates the company’s current business model. It can also help in creating a customer-centred business culture. It is designed to be applied to each customer profile separately, thus enabling a deeper understanding of the customer logic of each relevant profile.

Earlier business model frameworks tend to be provider-centric and goods-dominant, and require further development and adaptation to service logic. This study adopts service logic in business model thinking. It embeds the true and deep customer understanding and customer value in each element of the business model, and contributes to both business model and service-dominant logic literature.

With the rapid development of information technologies and the internet, firms have increasingly focussed on customer interactions to realise value co-creation. Previous studies have empirically examined interaction orientation, but their measurements have been derived from goods-dominant logic and have not explained the mechanism of value co-creation. The purpose of this paper is to propose an operational definition and define the dimensions of interaction orientation based on value co-creation theory (IOVCC), and then develop a scale for it.

In this study, data were collected from employees via three questionnaire surveys, and then analysed using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.

The findings are as follows: IOVCC represents a firm’s implementation of a set of marketing actions aimed at inserting the firm into its customers’ daily life practices and co-creating value with the customers. The construct of IOVCC consists of five behavioural dimensions: “building communication channels”, “involving customers in co-production”, “improving service capabilities”, “improving interaction quality” and “integrating interaction resources”. The measurement scale for IOVCC has acceptable levels of reliability, content validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity and nomological validity.

This study enriches the literature on value co-creation theory by revealing the process and actions of co-creating value. It also contributes to the understanding of service touchpoints by highlighting the interaction quality of touchpoints. In addition, the authors have developed a reliable and valid scale for IOVCC, thereby facilitating the measurement of a firm’s implementation of the “value co-creation” business philosophy.

Though extant literature has identified goods-based brand image (GBBI) and services-based brand image (SBBI) as drivers of business-to-business (B2B) loyalty, their relative importance has remained unexplored. This study aims to bridge this gap.

The authors have used a retrospective sampling-based methodology to collect data from B2B customers via an offline survey with a sample size of 125 purchase managers.

The authors found that both GBBI and SBBI have positive relationships with B2B loyalty, with customer satisfaction being the mediator. Using the construal level theory (CLT), the authors argue that the B2B purchase term, vendor–customer relationship strength and physical accessibility of the vendor are associated with the construal level of the purchase context. Further, the authors show that B2B customers give higher importance to GBBI in lower construal level and higher importance to SBBI in higher construal level. The authors have also found the moderated mediation effect of customer satisfaction in GBBI–loyalty and SBBI–loyalty relationships with construal level as moderator.

This study contributes to extant literature of B2B branding and purchase decision-making by bringing in concepts of CLT. It also extends the literature of the GBBI–SBBI–loyalty relationship by bringing in newer results, which reassure the coexistence of goods-dominant and service-dominant logic in the B2B marketplace.

Important managerial implications have been discussed to help B2B managers in brand building, product–service design and relationship management.

This paper is a pioneer in using the CLT in the B2B purchase contexts. It also provides a theoretical and psychological underpinning of goods–service dilemmas in the B2B context, which is also noble.

Providing that branded applications (apps) became a new trend in mobile marketing, the purpose of this study, thus, is to explore how to promote app users’ continuance intention and purchase intention (i.e. “app continuance”) toward a specific branded app.

By integrating both goods-dominant logic (GDL) and service-dominant logic (SDL), this study uses a unifying model to examine whether perceived usefulness and task-service fit (TSF) have different effects on the two parts of app continuance. This study identifies task characteristic and four service characteristics (interactivity, presence, localization and ubiquity) as antecedents of TSF. Furthermore, psychological barriers are examined as mediators of TSF and purchase intention within SDL. Data collected from 631 users of the targeted branded apps support all of the proposed hypotheses.

The findings show that besides perceived usefulness, TSF is an essential determinant of both app continuance in the context of branded apps and a partial mediator of psychological barriers between TSF and purchase intention.

Unlike prior studies, which have focused on traditional GDL to examine continuance intention, this study incorporates SDL and the notion of psychological barriers to explore such matters. The evidence concerning the significantly higher explanatory power of the full model suggests that a deeper understanding of the antecedents of app continuance is possible when the alternative view is taken into consideration, thus providing a promising avenue for future research.

The aim of this paper is to suggest a new competence‐based framework for describing and analysing the initiation of the transition of goods‐dominant companies to service providers. The paper seeks to illustrate the relevance of the new framework in an empirical study of a knowledge‐intensive mechanical engineering company.

A single‐case study of the world's leading maker of tool steel forms the empirical basis for the paper. A study based on a qualitative research methodology, involving inductive inquiry and a field study over six years focusing on “narratives from the field” was conducted.

New competencies are needed to initiate the transition from products to service and to manage service‐based offerings. The findings are summarised in two categories. The first, “customer value socialisation”, refers to the sharing of experiences and knowledge among employees. The second, “customer value management”, refers to management's ability to encourage employees to create value‐in‐use for the customers.

The study contributes to the literature by: focusing on issues related to competence (rather than organisational structures and strategy); identifying “customer value socialisation” and “customer value management” as the important dimensions for engendering competence in employees; and introducing the concepts of “unfreezing”, “movement”, and “refreezing,” into the management of the necessary cultural change that must accompany the transition.

This paper aims to deal with the concepts of “institutions” and “institutional logics” in the context of business-to-business (B2B) marketing systems and uses institutional theory as a framework to look at value co-creation.

By integrating the literature on value co-creation, institutional theory and institutional entrepreneurship, the paper argues that the boundaries of B2B marketing systems are continuously reshaped through legitimation processes occurring through actors’ institutional work, thus making co-created value the only legitimate value.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework and furthers the conceptual development of value co-creation and augments the literature on service-dominant logic and the notion of co-created value by assuming a legitimacy-based B2B market systems perspective.

This paper presents a number of propositions that serve to illustrate several managerial implications. These arise from organizations co-creating value by conforming to the various institutional logics that maximize their legitimacy.

The paper makes a contribution by developing a critical theoretical framework based on the application of institutional theoretical constructs/concepts (e.g. ceremonial conformity, decoupling, considerations of face, confidence and good faith).

This paper aims to investigate the service ecosystem of facility/facilities management (FM) against the Vargo and Lusch framework of service-dominant logic (S-D Logic).

A theoretical argument guided by previous research into service excellence in FM.

In the paper, two arguments are made. First, FM is still dominated by a contractual logic grounded in the tangible world of buildings and bills of quantities. Second, the reciprocal flow of services inherent in the S-D Logic offers a powerful tool for appreciating real service excellence and a business contribution from FM.

The S-D Logic framework is theoretical but, it is argued, has profound implications for the practical delivery of FM and the addition of both business and social value.

The reciprocal flow of service (as recognition, involvement and development) to FM’s “shop-floor” staff – the actual fee earners – may be the cornerstone of the co-creation and partnership, much espoused but less frequently practiced.

Extant family business research focuses on the understanding of value creation through the binary interactions between the family and its business (the family – business nexus). This article addresses this issue by expanding the understanding of value creation beyond the family-business nexus to that of value creation among a wider set of stakeholders (the family business service ecosystem). It recognizes the multi-faceted nature of family businesses and conceptualizes a value creation process through a broader scope of internal and external stakeholders.

This research theoretically connects Business Model Innovation (BMI) and Service dominant logic (SDL) as foundations of an ecosystem approach of value creation established through collaboration, coproduction and co-creation based on Value in Use (ViU). The authors then present the FB Service Ecosystem BM.

This research generates an overarching model of value creation and integration that reflects and enacts the purpose of the family firm’s project through interactions with ad hoc internal and external actors as possible Third Avenue of value creation, transcending the family versus business paradox. Termed FB Service Ecosystem, this overarching model can be at the forefront of economic, ecological and societal transition, by tacitly transmitting such BMs through their networks of stakeholders. The FB Service Ecosystem is important because it can support the transition of economies and societies based on service, collaboration and meeting multiple stakeholder needs.

This research addresses the dichotomy between financial and non-financial outcomes and between agency and stewardship. It transcends this paradox to offer an inclusive value creation perspective considering a wider set of internal and external stakeholders based on reciprocal service provision and co-creation of mutual value, foundations of service dominant logic, among actors of a service ecosystem federated by and around the family business, termed Family Business Service Ecosystem.

Servitization has been recognized as an effective means for manufacturers to achieve superior performance. However, the servitization-performance relationship is controversial since prior empirical studies have provided inconsistent and even contradictory results. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative review on the servitization-performance relationship based on research findings reported in the extant literature.

Studies from 41 peer-reviewed journal articles were sampled and analyzed. A meta-analytic approach was adopted to conduct a quantitative review on the relationship between servitization and firm performance.

The results confirm a positive servitization-performance relationship. In addition, the results reveal that the observed servitization-performance relationship is influenced by the operationalization of constructs (servitization and performance) and control variables (industry and region).

As the first meta-analysis on the servitization-performance relationship, this study contributes to the servitization literature and provides future research directions.