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This study aims to understand how online weight loss services could help customers achieve a durable change. The particular focus is on exploring the roles of value co-creation and well-being outcomes in reinforcing the transformative value potential, which is argued to be realized as customers’ intentions to continue a healthier lifestyle after the service period has ended.

Data was collected from the participants of an online weight loss service (n = 498), and a conceptual research model was tested using structural equation modelling.

The results imply that compliance with the guidelines and social support are two value co-creation activities that can influence the well-being outcomes of transformative services (i.e. perceived behavioral control and satisfaction with one’s achievements). These well-being outcomes help attain the transformative value potential of online weight loss services. However, the actual weight loss affected the transformative value potential only through customers’ satisfaction with their achievements as a subjective well-being outcome.

This study provides insight into the transformative value potential of services in the weight loss context. This study contributes to the transformative service research by focusing on the role of online services in reinforcing a durable change through the co-creation of value and improvements in customers’ well-being.

This paper aims to examine the service experience in an online support community of consumers to understand the nature of social support and how it is experienced and enacted by vulnerable consumers.

A netnographic study was conducted to examine vulnerable consumers’ participation in an online support group for weight management. The Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) program was used, and additionally data were coded using open coding. A hybrid approach to data analysis was undertaken using inductive and deductive methods.

The findings suggest online social support groups can be used as an online “third place” to support vulnerable consumers, with vulnerable groups engaging with the online support group differently than those in the normal weight group. Social support was also found to be bi-directional in nature.

This study only investigates one online support group. To gain deeper insights, other support groups should be examined over a longer period.

This paper demonstrates that transformative services have the hidden capacity to optimize their services to enable vulnerable consumers to co-create social support in a safe place, thus providing a non-judgmental environment with the end goal of improving their health and well-being.

Findings reveal how services can enable marginalization and stigmatization to be overcome and inspire social action through the use of online support groups.

This research is unique in that it used a netnography approach to examine how vulnerable consumers interact in an online service setting, reducing self-report bias and allowing for a natural research setting, thus allowing a unique understanding of how vulnerable consumers experience and enact social support.

This paper aims to enhance the current understanding of digital self-services (computerized cognitive behavioral therapy [cCBT]) and how they could be better incorporated into integrated mental health care from the physician’s perspective. Service marketing and information systems literature are combined in the context of mental health-care delivery.

An online survey of 412 Finnish physicians was undertaken to understand physicians’ acceptance of cCBT. The study applies thematic analysis and structural equation modeling to answer its research questions.

Adopting a service marketing perspective helps understand how digital self-services can be incorporated in health-care delivery. The findings suggest that value creation within this context should be seen as an intertwined process where value co-creation and self-creation should occur seamlessly at different stages. Furthermore, the usefulness of having a value self-creation supervisor was identified. These value creation logic changes should be understood and enabled to incorporate digital self-services into integrated mental health-care delivery.

Because health-care systems vary across countries, strengthening understanding through exploring different contexts is crucial.

Assistance should be provided to physicians to enable better understanding of the application and suitability of digital self-service as a treatment option (such as cCBT) within their profession. Additionally, supportive facilitating conditions should be created to incorporate them as part of integrated care chain.

Digital self-services have the potential to serve goals beyond routine activities in a health-care setting.

This study demonstrates the relevance of service theories within the health-care context and improves understanding of value creation in digital self-services. It also offers a profound depiction of the barriers to acceptance.

Online offerings for transformative services create value for consumers, although little research examines the process through which these services deliver this value. The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive framework to capture the complexity of the co-creation of transformative value experienced by the consumers of online transformative services.

This paper uses a netnography approach to examine longitudinal data from an online weight management program. In total, this research examines 15,304 posts from 3,149 users, including eight staff users.

Consumers integrate a range of social support resources, from informational support to esteem support, which provide a range of benefits such as new ideas and self-efficacy that underpin the different types of value such as epistemic and personal value. The degree of co-created value differs across the consumption experience but culminates over time into transformative value.

The proposed framework may be useful beyond the weight management and online contexts; however, further work is required in a range of behavioral contexts and other modes of service delivery.

By understanding the resources consumers integrate and value, co-created services can develop appropriate value propositions to assist in improving consumers’ well-being.

This research provides a comprehensive framework of the transformative value co-creation process, extending on existing frameworks which examine either the process, value co-creation or the types of value co-created.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the utilization and goals of digital marketing, and examines factors that influence the adoption and use of digital marketing channels in SMEs.

The data comprises semi-structured theme interviews in SMEs among 16 managers and 421 survey respondents in Central Finland.

The results of this study reveal that SMEs seem not use the full potential of the new digital tools, and so are not deriving benefit from the opportunities they provide. Furthermore, the results also raise the question of whether SMEs have understood the fundamental change in the nature of communication brought about by digitization.

The data comes from one region and thus the research context limits the generalizability of the results.

SMEs seem not to be keeping pace with digital developments, mostly due to the lack of knowledge of digital marketing. Most of the studied SMEs do not apply the full potential of the new digital tools and hence are not benefitting fully from them.

Discussions on the future regional development of SMEs have called for training programmes to help SMEs exploit digitization. This is something that the government should take note of.

Whereas the adoption process of new technologies such as IT in general and the internet in particular have been examined in the SME literature, this is among the first studies examining adoption and usage of digital tools from the marketing perspective.