Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the theoretical and practical implications of adopting customer-dominant logic (CDL) of service, focusing on how firms can become involved in the customers’ context.

Inspired by the conceptual discussion of service logic and service-dominant logic, this paper focuses on the conceptual underpinnings of CDL. CDL is contrasted with other service perspectives in marketing; CDL is a marketing and business perspective dominated by customer-related aspects instead of products, service, systems, costs or growth. It is grounded in understanding customer logic and how firms’ offerings can become embedded in customers’ lives/businesses.

The conceptual analysis challenges the prevailing assumptions of key phenomena in service research, including interaction, co-creation, service value and service. The paper presents five essential foundations of CDL: marketing as a business perspective, customer logic as the central concept, offering seen through the customer lens, value as formed and not created and the prevalence of customer ecosystems.

The paper differentiates CDL from other marketing perspectives. Further empirical research is needed in different empirical settings to provide guidelines for adopting the perspective on a strategic and operational business level.

As a firm’s holistic and strategic foundation, marketing is based on understanding how providers participate, at a profit, in customers’ value formation. The paper suggests how firms can successfully conduct business in dynamic markets with empowered customers.

This paper expands marketing and business logic based on customer dominance. It accentuates the importance of understanding customer logic and stresses the presence of providers in the customer ecosystem.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the technical and relational value proposition preferences of credit union members and to examine the relationship between their preference and patronage activity.

A total of 800 members of credit unions were surveyed. Exploratory factor analysis was used and four factors were extracted incorporating technical and relational dimensions of the credit union service. Member value proposition preferences are examined and the relationship to patronage activity of the credit union was explored.

The majority of members express a higher or equal preference for a relational rather than a technical value proposition. Those that express a greater or equal preference for relational value are more likely to have a higher level of patronage activity.

Credit unions are member-owned financial institutions and hence the study is context dependent. Credit unions are member-owned financial institutions and hence relational value may be more significant than in the case of non-member owned entities.

The research highlights the importance of consideration of relational value in financial services entities whose competitive advantage lies in the relational. In terms of the credit union, the impact on the relational value proposition of the credit union must be considered in the design and implementation of industry restructuring.

This paper extends the emotional value and interactive quality construct to incorporate a greater relational focus which the paper suggests is of greater relevance to high-contact financial services. The research in this paper also extends beyond the criticised static focus of consumer perceived scales (consumer perceived value) and the episode focused service quality scales. Hence, it has a more longitudinal and holistic focus. The paper also incorporates a preference between benefits approach rather than an evaluative or trade-off between benefits and costs framework.

Managing service brands entails managing a portfolio of brand relationships with customers and non-customers. The paper develops a framework for diagnosing the strength of a service brand colored by a customer-dominant business logic perspective. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Combining insights from the literature on branding, service, and relationship management, the paper develops a customer-dominant conceptual and methodological approach. Brand strength captures customers' attachment to a brand in terms of their thoughts, feelings, and actions toward the brand. Since brand strength is the configuration of customers' and non-customers' brand relationships, the paper divides the brand relationship into two components – brand connection and purchase status – to compose a brand strength map.

Grounded in customers' accumulated positive and negative experiences, the framework creates a diagnostic picture of the strength of the brand, and an illustrative empirical study demonstrates the mapping procedure's applicability to service brands.

The approach is an alternative to a traditional measurement scale development approach. Future studies should explore the framework's adaptability to different contexts, stakeholders, and industries.

The distinctive model comprehensively captures the aggregate picture of customers' brand relationships, and the managerially parsimonious framework can be adapted to different service settings.

The framework represents a novel diagnostic tool for service companies to explore their brand's strength. The approach is unique because it adopts a customer-dominant perspective. Furthermore, it includes behavior with a relational perspective and negative responses, which reduce overall brand strength.

The purpose of this paper is to extend current discussions of value creation and propose a customer dominant value perspective. The point of origin in a customer‐dominant marketing logic (C‐D logic) is the customer, rather than the service provider, interaction or the system. The focus is shifted from the company's service processes involving the customer, to the customer's multi‐contextual value formation, involving the company.

Value formation is contrasted to earlier views on the company's role in value creation in a conceptual analysis focusing on five central aspects. Implications of the proposed characteristics of value formation compared to earlier approaches are put forward.

The paper highlights earlier hidden aspects on the role of a service for the customer. It is proposed that value is not always an active process of creation; instead, value is embedded and formed in the highly dynamic and multi‐contextual reality and life of the customer. This leads to a need to look beyond the line of visibility focused on visible customer‐company interactions, to the invisible and mental life of the customer. From this follows a need to extend the temporal scope, from exchange and use even further to accumulated experiences in the customer's life and ecosystem.

This paper is conceptual. It discusses and presents a customer‐dominant value perspective and suggests implications for empirical research and practice.

Awareness of the mechanism of the customer value formation process provides companies with new insight on the service strategy, service design and new service innovations.

The paper contributes by extending the value construct through a new customer dominant value perspective, recognizing value as multi‐contextual and dynamic based on customers' life and ecosystem. The findings mark out new avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate an approach to managerially monitoring customer‐experienced value of e‐services. The need for this study is based on a lack of models of e‐service value applying a value‐in‐use approach on the one hand, and on the other hand the increasing need for managerially viable techniques to diagnose customers' views of e‐service value.

The approach, customized for but not limited to e‐services, employs four principal value dimensions (technical, functional, temporal and spatial) anchored in service quality and value research to capture e‐service value. The approach has two new characteristics. It focuses on relative joint evaluations of benefits and sacrifice and on the degree of customer activation. The empirical study based on a large‐scale web survey of users' evaluations of a travel agency's web service illustrates how the approach can be used.

The theoretically based approach showed in the empirical study that managerially interesting findings could be generated. As respondents in the sample were extensively positive towards the service provider the whole potential of the approach could not be effectively empirically demonstrated. Further empirical studies are needed to investigate the managerial relevance of the approach.

The present empirical study represents promising first results from a novel approach to determining customer‐experienced service value. These findings raise a number of questions that should be answered in further research in order to further develop the approach.

The suggested approach contributes to marketing practice by offering a method to acquiring information about how strongly different service elements add value to the service experienced by the customer. It also reveals value shortcomings or dimensions and sub‐dimensions that decrease value and thus provides information of where the company does not meet customers' observations of competing offerings.

The paper introduces a novel way of conceptualising value as benefits and sacrifice relative to a reference point represented by the competition. Connecting this to customer action rather than only perceptions represents another new feature. The paper contributes to service marketing by introducing a new technique for capturing customers' service preferences following a value‐in‐use approach.

To develop a conceptual framework for temporal and spatial e‐service value.

In the empirical study, the temporal and spatial value of e‐services is qualitatively explored. Positioned within service research, a conceptualisation of customer perceived value based on benefit and sacrifice of technical, functional, temporal and spatial dimensions is used.

The qualitative study identifies subdimensions of temporal and spatial value. In addition to benefits such as access and flexibility, these subdimensions also involve aspects related to temporal and spatial sacrifice. The subdimensions indicate the versatility of the dimensions. Another finding is the interdependence between the benefit and sacrifice of service value.

Extends prior research by qualitatively describing benefit and sacrifice of temporal and spatial value. Presents a conceptual model of temporal and spatial e‐service value. Future research needs to quantitatively validate the subdimensions of the temporal and spatial dimensions across different contexts.

Shows what temporal and spatial aspects in services create value for customers, especially in an e‐service context. Particularly, it identifies aspects that decrease the perceived service value. An important marketing challenge is to emphasize and develop the value‐increasing parts of a service while understanding and reducing its value‐decreasing components.

Contributes to marketing research and practice with its conceptualisation of temporal and spatial e‐service value. The importance of time and location in creating customer perceived value is emphasised.

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 explores consumers' responsiveness to marketing communication about various services and products in three different media. Communication value is seen as an element of service value and is measured as consumer responsiveness to marketing communication.

The empirical data is based on interviews with consumers concerning their perceptions of the relevance and acceptance of marketing communication of 15 different services/products in three media, traditional direct mail, e‐mail and SMS. The consumers have responded to scenarios of marketing communication.

Findings showed differences in consumer responsiveness to different services and physical products. The overall responsiveness was relatively low for the offerings in all media. A division into responsiveness groups demonstrates that there are also consumers that are positive to communication. The share of positive consumers varies considerably over offerings.

The present study did not account for some important aspects in marketing communication. Firstly, the communication was not considered as part of a firm's integrated marketing communication. The creative element was omitted even if it in practice is important in planned marketing communication. Moreover, the respondents have evaluated scenarios based on their general attitudes toward the communication. The consumer's relationship to the company/brand/offering was excluded. However, despite these limitations it shows that it is necessary to consider that products and services may have different responsiveness patterns.

The emergence of digital media has increased the number of ways to interact with consumers. The variation in the responsiveness to products and services for different media indicates that it is important to have an understanding of how the media adds and subtracts value. The analysis points to the need for companies to measure the responsiveness of consumers in order to understand and enhance consumer perceived value of the communication as a part of the service.

The paper contributes to service marketing research by introducing the communication value and responsiveness conceptualisations that have an interest both for academic research and practitioners. This includes a new perspective on the role of communication on one hand and on the empirical findings of differences in digital interactive media on the other hand.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for examining the outcome of value facilitation as the added value of service provision.

Value facilitation is conceptualized as enabling, enhancing, and economical support by the service offering, as well as supportiveness by the service provider. The financial value of customers is measured by the augmented customer lifetime value (ACLV).

Referrals is found to mediate the linkage between value facilitation and ACLV. The margin multiple level and corresponding propensity to stay scores are found to be better proxies for setting up a customer oriented service development program, than the customer profit or margin level.

This paper takes a service provider perspective on service, even though the customer experience of the service provision is vital.

The proposed framework can be used for designing adapted customer strategies for different groups of customers representing different levels of added value of the service provision.

This paper extends the normative service logic notion of the role of service providers as value facilitators and supporters of their customers’ value creation activities. The calculation of ACLV is altered from ordinary customer lifetime value models by the integration of individual transaction data and propensity to stay figures from a customer survey.