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Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

Past research on luxury is fragmented resulting in challenges to define what the construct of luxury means. Based on a need for conceptual clarity, this study aims to map how research conceptualises luxury and its creation.

This study presents a scoping review of luxury articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Of the initial 270 articles discovered by using the database of Scopus, and after control searching in Web of Science and reference scanning, 54 high-quality studies published before the end of 2020 were found to meet the inclusion criteria and comprised the final analytical corpus.

The findings demonstrate that research approaches luxury and its creation from three different perspectives: the provider-, consumer- and co-creation perspectives. In addition, the findings pinpoint how the perspectives differ from each other due to fundamental and distinguishing features and reveal particularities that underlie the perspectives.

The suggested framework offers implications to researchers who are interested in evaluating and developing luxury studies. Based on the identified luxury perspectives, the study identifies future research avenues.

The study contributes to the luxury research stream by advancing an understanding of an existing pluralistic perspective and by adding conceptual clarity to luxury literature. It also contributes to marketing and branding research by showing how the luxury literature connects to the evolution of value creation research in marketing literature.

Digital platform users not only consume but also produce communication related to their experiences. Although service research has explored users' motivations to communicate and focused on outcomes such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), it remains largely unexplored how users iteratively interact with communication artifacts and potentially create value for themselves, other users and service providers. The purpose of this paper is, thus, to introduce communicative affordances as a framework to advance user-created communication (UCC) in service.

Drawing from the literature in communication, service research and interactive marketing, an affordance perspective on UCC in service is introduced.

Three UCC affordances for the service context are presented – interactivity, visibility and anonymity – opportunities and challenges for service providers associated with these affordances are discussed and, finally, affordance-specific research questions and general recommendations for future research are offered.

By conceptualizing UCC in service from an affordances perspective, this paper moves beyond the traditional sender–receiver communication framework and emphasizes opportunities and challenges for service research and practice.

Instead of focusing separately on specific technologies or user behaviors, it is recommended that service managers adopt a holistic perspective of user goals and motivations, use experiences and platform design.

By conceptualizing UCC as an augmenting, dialogical process concerning users’ experiences, and by introducing communicative affordances as a framework to advance UCC in service, an in-depth understanding of the diverse and ever-evolving landscape of communication in service is offered.

The definition of value adopted by the current service perspective on marketing theory is value as value-in-use. Surprisingly, however, little attention has been given to the question of what constitutes value-in-use for customers in service contexts? Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide an empirical account of value-in-use from service customers' point of view.

To capture and analyze customers' experiences of value-in-use in the typical service context of retail banking, this study employed a narrative-based critical incident technique (CIT) and a graphical tool called the value chart.

The study identified seven empirical dimensions of positive and negative value-in-use: solution, attitude, convenience, expertise, speed of service, flexibility and monetary costs. Interestingly, these value-in-use dimensions overlap considerably with previously identified dimensions of service quality.

The concepts of service quality and value-in-use in service contexts seem to represent the same empirical phenomenon despite their different theoretical traditions. Measuring customer-perceived service quality might therefore be a good proxy for assessing value-in-use in service contexts.

As the findings indicate that service quality is the way in which service customers experience value-in-use, service managers are recommended to focus on continuous quality management to facilitate the creation of value-in-use.

This study is the first to explicitly raise the notion that in the minds of service customers, value defined as value-in-use and service quality may represent the same empirical phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to explore value formation in the customer-bank relationship outside the line of visibility of service encounters. The customer's own context has been overlooked by the bank marketing literature as it is traditionally focused on value created by the service process and outcome.

Positioned within the customer dominant logic, a netnography was conducted to explore how bank relationships are realised in customers’ own contexts and experiences. A total of 579 postings from discussions of retail banking in 18 online communities were collected and analysed.

The study uncovered four factors of invisible bank service value experienced by customers: shared moral value, responsibility value, relationship value, and heritage value.

The study conceptualises bank service value as realised in the customers’ own contexts and thus highlights previously hidden sources of value in banking. The findings can be used for further conceptualisations of the customer dominant value formation of bank services.

The netnographic method illustrates how naturalistic data about customers’ retail bank experiences can be retrieved unobtrusively. The findings help bank management to understand what comprises customer value beyond the service encounter.

The paper contributes to the research in service marketing and bank marketing in three ways: first, a methodological contribution is the introduction of a netnographic approach to bank service value research. Second, a theoretical contribution is the uncovering of invisible value formation in the customer-bank relationship. Third, the paper uses the customer dominant logic in a banking context, thus providing insights into how banks are involved in the customer's own life.

The purpose of this paper is to review customer experience formation (CXF) by first locating and analyzing how researchers approach CXF in the service literature and the theoretical underpinnings of these approaches, and then assessing which approaches are best suited for understanding, facilitating, and examining CXF in today’s service landscape.

This study systematically reviews 163 articles published between 1998 and 2015 in the service field.

This study illustrates how researchers approach CXF on the individual level by applying stimulus- interaction- or sense-making-based perspectives. These reflect researchers’ theoretical underpinnings for how individuals realize the customer experience within environmental, social, and temporal contexts through intermediation. Researchers further apply contextual lenses, including the dyadic and service- or customer-ecosystem lenses, which reflect their theoretical underpinnings for explaining how various actor constellations and contextual boundaries frame individual-level CXF. Finally, this study shows why the sense-making-based perspective, together with a service- or customer-ecosystem lens, is particularly suitable for approaching complex CXF in today’s service settings.

To advance theory, researchers should choose the approaches resonant with their research problem and worldview but also consider that today’s complex service landscape favors holistic and systemic approaches over atomistic and dyadic ones.

This study provides managers with recommendations for understanding, facilitating, and evaluating contemporary CXF.

This study advances the understanding of CXF by systematically reviewing its multiple layers, approaches, and dimensions and the opportunities and challenges of each approach.