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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 respond to the criticism O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy made of service‐dominant logic in EJM, on behalf of both the paper and the worldwide community of scholars that have embraced S‐D logic as historically informed, integrative, transcending and rich in its potential to generate theoretical and practical contributions.

The paper is a critical, conceptual analysis of the fallacious arguments that O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy developed to argue against the emerging and rapidly developing service‐dominant logic.

The paper shows that, contrary to the claims of O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy, S‐D logic: is neither regressive nor intended to displace all other marketing perspectives; is not advocating technology at the expense of explanatory theory; and is pre‐theoretic and intended to be soundly grounded in a manner to assist theory construction.

Theory advancement is critical to marketing and S‐D logic puts special emphasis on the development of theory. It begins to do this by proposing ten foundational premises, which some may wish to refer to as axioms. From these axioms, considerable theoretical work and related empirical research can develop.

O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy wish to prevent marketing scholars from adopting, advocating, and supporting service‐dominant logic and, as they suggest, taking a backward step. They view the S‐D logic movement as primarily USA‐dominated (which it is not) and are firmly anti‐S‐D logic. The available evidence from around the world suggests that the S‐D logic movement has profound implications for the advancement of both marketing science and marketing practice.

It is critical that S‐D logic should not be viewed as being represented by a single paper but as a body of work that Lusch and Vargo have developed since their initial publication and also the work of a community of scholars working collaboratively to co‐create S‐D logic.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of a firm’s service-dominant orientation on marketing and technological capabilities, and its performance. It outlines how a service-dominant orientation offers guidance for the development and deployment of ordinary capabilities, and indirectly affects performance. Additionally, it delineates how dynamic capabilities affect the impact of a service-dominant orientation on ordinary capabilities.

Partial least squares structural equation modeling drawing on data from 228 firms serves to assess hypotheses relating service-dominant orientation and dynamic capabilities with firm performance.

The results indicate that marketing and technological capabilities fully mediate the relationship between a firm’s service-dominant orientation and firm performance. Furthermore, the positive marginal effect of a firm’s service-dominant orientation on its marketing capabilities increases with the firm displaying a stronger service-dominant orientation. In addition, the positive effect of service-dominant orientation on marketing capabilities reduces the more the firm deploys dynamic capabilities.

Because of the cross-sectional sample, future studies could adopt longitudinal research designs to explore the impact of a service-dominant orientation on ordinary capabilities and performance, or investigate the applicability of the findings in other contexts.

The findings imply that implementing a service-dominant orientation can be beneficial for firms. However, because the impact of such an orientation weakens the greater a firm’s dynamic capabilities, managers need to be mindful of this trade-off.

The study is the first to establish a link between the dynamic capability view, originating from strategy research, and service-dominant logic, stemming from marketing thinking.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the ontological and semantic foundations of consumer-dominant value creation to clarify the extent to which the call for a distinct consumer-dominant logic (CDL) is justified. This paper discusses consumer-driven value creation (value-in-use) across three different marketing logics: product-dominant logic (PDL), service-dominant logic (SDL) and CDL. PDL conceptualises value as created by firms and delivered to consumers through products. SDL frames consumer value as a function of direct provider-consumer interaction, or consumer-driven chains of action indirectly facilitated by the provider. Recently, the research focus has been turning to consumer-dominant value creation. While there is agreement on the significance of this phenomenon, there is disagreement over whether consumer-dominant value creation is an extension of SDL or calls for a distinct CDL.

This is a conceptual paper, which is informed by five cases of consumer dominance. The cases are used to clarify rather than verify the analysis of the ontological and semantic underpinnings of consumer-dominant value creation.

The ontological and semantic analysis demonstrates that PDL and SDL have insufficient explanatory power to accommodate substantial aspects of consumer-dominant value creation. By implication, this supports the call for a distinct CDL.

This paper contributes to the ongoing theoretical debate over the explanatory power of SDL by demonstrating that SDL is unable to accommodate important ontological and semantic aspects of consumer-driven value creation.

This paper aims to introduce the experience-dominant (Ex-D) logic model, which synthesizes the creation, perceptions and outcomes of Ex-D logic. It is designed to offer valuable insights for strategic managerial applications and future research directions.

Employing a qualitative approach by using eight selected product launch events from reviewed 100 event videos and 55 in-depth interviews with industrial managers to develop an Ex-D logic model, and data were coded and analysed via NVivo.

Results show that the firm’s Ex-D logic is operationalized as the mentalizing of the three types of customer needs (service competence, hedonic excitations and meaning making), the materializing of three types of customer experiences and customer journeys (service experience, hedonic experience and brand experience) and the moderating of three types of customer values (service values, hedonic values and brand values).

This study has implications for adding new insights into existing theory on dominant logic and customer experience management and also offers actionable recommendations for managerial applications.

This study sheds light on the importance of Ex-D logic from a strategic point of view and provides an organic view of the firm. It distinguishes firm perspective from customer perspective, firm experience from customer experience and firm journey from consumer journey.

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.

While goods- and service-dominant logics are separated in most research as alternative and often incompatible paradigms, this paper aims to show how these logics can be and are combined in purchasing strategies in organizations. The paper also illustrates that multiple logics exist in addition to purely goods- or service-based logics.

The paper is based on empirical data on the purchasing of management consulting services, which represent an extreme context for understanding the combination and intersection of goods- and service-dominant logics. In particular, four in-depth case studies and interviews with 51 sellers and 30 buyers of management consulting services are used to develop a typology of purchasing approaches that combines goods- and service-dominant logics.

The study shows that goods- and service-dominant logics are combined in two main purchasing phases: supplier set selection and assignment selection. In both these phases, parallel and knowledge-based, embedded and experience-based approaches were identified as ways of combining goods- and service-dominant logics in the purchasing context.

The research presented in the following adds to our existing understanding of possible purchasing strategies under multiple logics in buying organizations. Future research should explore the conditions under which different strategies are and should be applied in organizations.

This paper gives practitioners alternative approaches to choose from in their purchasing and sales of knowledge-intensive services, in addition to transactional and relational strategies.

The research adds to existing research on business and industrial marketing by identifying particular purchasing strategies on a continuum between goods- and service-dominant logics.

This paper aims to explore how the service‐dominant (S‐D) logic of marketing proposed by Vargo and Lusch impacts on business‐to‐business branding concepts and practice.

Vargo and Lusch argue that service interaction comes from goods‐in‐use as well as from interactions between a buyer and a supplier. Their key concepts are examined and the branding literature critically compared.

Goods become service appliances. Buyer judgments about the value‐in‐use of goods extends the time‐logic of marketing. The exchange concept is no longer transaction bound. Service‐ability (the capability to serve) becomes the essence of a firm's value propositions. Service experience becomes paramount in developing and sustaining the life of a brand.

S‐D logic highlights the need for rigour and clarity in the use of the term “brand”. It also opens up for consideration a variety of previously unexplored contact points in the customer service cycle, expanded to include customer assessments of value‐in‐use.

S‐D logic encourages extending brand strategies into a wider variety of communicative interaction modes.

Some of the issues raised are not new but currently compete for attention in the shadow of media‐dominant approaches to branding.

Service-dominant logic acknowledges that actors can influence how service ecosystems evolve through institutional work, but empirical research is only nascent. This paper advances understanding of ecosystem change by proposing that dynamic capabilities are a special type of operant resources enabling actors to conduct institutional work. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to explore which dynamic capabilities are associated with proactively influencing service ecosystems.

Drawing on service-dominant logic, institutional work and dynamic capabilities, this exploratory study assumes an actor-centric perspective and proposes a conceptual model with a hierarchy of dynamic capabilities as the antecedents for successfully influencing service ecosystems. The research model was tested with survey data using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

Among the dynamic capabilities studied, “visioning” and “influencing explicit institutions” directly affect “success in influencing service ecosystems,” whereas “timing” does so indirectly through “influencing explicit institutions.” The other dynamic capabilities studied have no significant effect on “success in influencing service ecosystems.” “Success in influencing service ecosystems” positively affects the “increased service ecosystem size and efficiency.”

In addition to reactively positioning and competing at the marketplace, firms can choose to proactively influence their service ecosystems’ size and efficiency. Firms aiming to influence service ecosystems should particularly develop dynamic capabilities related to visioning, timing and influencing explicit institutions.

This research is the first service-dominant logic investigation of the linkage between the actors’ dynamic capabilities and their ability to influence service ecosystems.