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Previous research on advertising in digital contexts has emphasized its persuasive and information processing roles for the customer. This paper aims to problematize this point of view and argues that the converged and interactive nature of digital media makes all advertising content into potential points of engagement in a digital media journey.

The paper is conceptual in nature and applies service logic (SL) and customer engagement to reconceptualize digital advertising and selling.

The authors present digital advertisements and digital media content as elements that contribute to a digital media journey, which ideally leads to a purchase. Advertising content is regarded as a resource used by consumers in their underlying value-creating processes. Thus, the digital advertising process is conceptualized as a customer-driven process of engaging with digital media content, where a purchase is incorporated in (and naturally follows from) the theme of engagement.

The paper introduces the concept of contextually embedded selling, which refers to a process where digital advertising content is thematically congruent with the surrounding editorial content, so that both contribute to the same consumer journey. Otherwise, consumers experience a contextual jump – a disconnect in theme, place or time during the consumer’s process of engagement with the digital content.

The paper contributes to advertising theory on advertising, engagement and the emerging research on consumer journey design by presenting an approach based on SL, namely, contextually embedded digital selling.

The paper aims to introduce the idea that consumers have relationships with their own recurring activities. Instead of the usual notion of investigating the relationships between actors, or between actors and their possessions, the paper focuses on the relationship between an actor and a particular activity in which the actor regularly participates.

The paper is conceptual and exploratory in nature. It discusses different perspectives of consumer activity in marketing and then introduces a relationship view of activity. The paper proceeds to outline the conceptual foundations of this view by applying relationship characteristics found in the literature. Quotes from runners’ blogs are used to illustrate the different identified relationship themes.

The paper argues that consumers can be seen as having long-term relationships with their activities, and it introduces the concept of the “activity relationship”. The paper proceeds to demonstrate how this concept differs from the previous conceptualization of consumer activity and relationships.

The activity-relationship perspective on consumer behavior opens up new venues for marketing research. It also facilitates new types of marketing practice, whereby producers can focus on supporting their customers’ relationships with valuable activities.

The paper presents a novel perspective on relationships. It contributes to consumer research and the customer-dominant view of marketing, whereby the customer’s perspective is put in focus and businesses serve as ingredients in the customer’s own context.

This paper aims to develop and apply a service design method that allows for stronger recognition and integration of human activities into the front-end stages of the service design process.

Following a discussion of different service design perspectives and activity theory, the paper develops a method called activity-set mapping (ActS). ActS is applied to an exploratory service design project to demonstrate its use.

Three broad perspectives on service design are suggested: (1) the dyadic interaction, (2) the systemic interaction and (3) the customer activity perspectives. The ActS method draws on the latter perspective and focuses on the study of human activity sets. The application of ActS shows that the method can help identify and visualize sets of activities.

The ActS method opens new avenues for service design by zooming in on the micro level and capturing the set of activities linked to a desired goal achievement. However, the method is limited to activities reported by research participants and may exclude unconscious activities. Further research is needed to validate and refine the method.

The ActS method will help service designers explore activities in which humans engage to achieve a desired goal/end state.

The concept of “human activity set” is new to service research and opens analytical opportunities for service design. The ActS method contributes a visualization tool for identifying activity sets and uncovering the benefits, sacrifices and frequency of activities.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly important issue for service brands in fast fashion retailing, as consumers' negative impressions about retailers' CSR activities influence brand experience. Consumers' impressions of CSR efforts arise based on agendas communicated through many channels from different sources. The paper unravels the ‘wrinkles’, i.e. possible mismatches in CSR communication around service brands by studying differences between the three main sources of fast fashion brand-related CSR agendas: Autonomous company communication, news media and social media postings by consumers.

The authors use structural topic modeling (STM) to analyze a corpus of texts focusing on the CSR efforts of three major fast fashion service brands over three years. The texts included 89 items of company communication (CSR reports and press releases), 5,351 news media articles about the brands' CSR efforts and 57,377 consumer generated tweets about the brands.

The STM analysis extracted 26 different CRS-related topics from the texts. Results showed differences in how much the three sources emphasized topics. The brands' own communication puts emphasis on environmental responsibility. News media tended to report on economic issues, treatment of employees and specific CSR-related events. Twitter showed more activity in discussing incident-based and emotionally charged topics.

The results feed into the ongoing discussion about how companies' CSR communication relates to communication in the press and among consumers. The authors highlight themes in the individual topics that are emphasized by the three sources, and discuss how CSR themes emerge in the overall transformative agenda.

The paper highlights how fast fashion service brands can identify and understand different CSR agendas arising around their brand. Insight into such agendas can be used to tailor the brands' communication strategies.

The paper contributes to the understanding of the factors behind fashion service brands' CSR reputation, highlighting how the three main sources of CSR reputation (company reports, news and social media) emphasize different types of agendas.

Customer activity in service has mainly been understood within the boundaries of interactions with service providers. This paper goes beyond this view to focus on the customer's independent activity, of which interaction is only a part. Moreover, the concept of customer activity remains largely unexplored and undefined. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to develop the concept of customer activity and to show how it can be applied in an empirical study.

The paper reviews the concept of customer activity in service marketing. It then goes on to characterise and operationalise the concept, and finally apply it to an explorative study. The study contrasts customer activity from the provider's interaction-centric point of view with customer activity from the customer's own point of view.

This paper defines customer activities as discrete sequences of behaviour that aim at creating or supporting some types of value in the customer's life or business. A customer-dominant perspective on customer activity allows companies to understand the role of their service in the various activities of different types of customers.

The paper contributes to service research by bringing attention to the concept of customer activity and contrasting it with alternative concepts. The paper is the first to show how customers combine different activities (where service interaction is only one type) into systems, which they maintain to create value for themselves. By profiling customers according to activity systems, providers can understand their own role in the customer's network of value-creating activities.

The paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and companies in creating value by outlining a customer‐based approach to service. The customer's logic is examined in‐depth as being the foundation of a customer‐dominant (CD) marketing and business logic.

The authors argue that both the goods‐ and service‐dominant logic are provider‐dominant. Contrasting the provider‐dominant logic with CD logic, the paper examines the creation of service value from the perspectives of value‐in‐use, the customer's own context, and the customer's experience of service.

Moving from a provider‐dominant logic to a CD logic uncovered five major challenges to service marketers: company involvement, company control in co‐creation, visibility of value creation, scope of customer experience, and character of customer experience.

The paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective and suggests implications for research and practice.

Awareness of the mechanisms of customer logic will provide businesses with new perspectives on the role of the company in their customers' lives. It is proposed that understanding the customer's logic should represent the starting‐point for the company's marketing and business logic.

The paper increases the understanding of how the customer's logic underpins the CD business logic. By exploring consequences of applying a CD logic, further directions for theoretical and empirical research are suggested.

The purpose of this study is to create a value variation measurement model to define the relationship among various roles in resource management within a service system; and divide value creation into two states (i.e. cocreation and codestruction) and use them as crucial indicators for value variation by adopting the service-dominant logic and using the Markov switching model.

This study proposed that variations in value are similar to changes in economy because both are abstract, indefinable and not easy to identify. Therefore, this study used the Markov switching model to define the state of value through value cocreation and codestruction; analyze value variations in a service system; and provide a numerical evaluation method by using the concept of probability to depict state transitions. In addition, open data from the Kaohsiung City Government’s 1999 call center were collected to address the aforementioned research objectives. The 1999 call center (service provider) offers citizens (customers) efficient consultant services to help them solve problems regarding the city government’s affairs or policies. Thus, this call center can be considered a complex service system.

This study revealed that the call center can utilize the analysis results of the Markov switching model on answer rates to predict service quality patterns. In addition, most first call resolution rates occurred under State 1 (value cocreation). To address problems caused by accidental or rare events, the call center should formulate policies to increase people and technical resources and improve service system effectiveness.

Enterprises currently focus on catering to customers’ needs and offering services through comprehensive service procedures to sustainably generate multiple values for customers, helping them to create values. Previous studies have mostly focused on analyzing the values of a service system and have failed to extensively explore actual value variations. Thus, the value variation measurement model proposed in the present study was able to analyze value variations of a set of call center data and illustrate value variations by using state transitions.