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The purpose of this paper is to explore strategies for visualizing the value of service‐based offerings in a B2B context. By taking a process perspective on the offering life cycle, this paper also aims at distinguishing which visualization strategies are most appropriate using at which life‐cycle stages.

The study employed a qualitative, multiple‐case study research design involving five manufacturing firms.

Primary findings are that firms need to make use of several different visualization strategies depending on, among other things, the key stakeholders and also where the firm's offering is currently positioned in the service‐based offering life cycle.

While the empirical data is from only one sector – i.e. manufacturing – managers from other B2B sectors should have an interest in the results and the key aspects identified. Further research could also establish linkages to performance metrics.

Visualization strategies have been relatively rarely studied from a B2B perspective, and the process dimension, especially, is novel.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the risks for manufacturing companies of extending their traditional goods offerings by the addition of different kinds of services.

The study develops a conceptual framework of nine propositions (and corresponding diagrammatic representations) of the relationships between: three kinds of risk (operational, strategic, and financial); and three strategies for the provision of added service (customisation, bundling, and broadening the range of offerings). This conceptual framework is examined empirically by qualitative analysis of data gathered in a three‐year longitudinal study of managerial representatives from nine multinational manufacturing firms engaged in the addition of services to their traditional goods offerings.

It was found that eight of the nine propositions are fully supported, and one receives equivocal support. In addition, several contextual factors are identified as moderating influences on the relationships between the three categories of service offering and the three classes of risk.

The study provides an original conceptual framework and nine research propositions that represent a useful starting point for the development of a formal theory of the risks of providing services.

The conceptual framework provides guidance for managers' assessments of the risks accompanying the infusion of added services to the traditional goods offerings of manufacturing companies.

The paper provides a novel conceptualisation of service innovation and attendant risk.

Service scholars have questioned the usefulness of the concept of tangibility/intangibility as a characteristic of services for two reasons: first, it is ambiguous and does not differentiate between services and goods; and second, because all offerings, despite their characteristics, render service to customers. Consequently, scholars have suggested discarding the concept altogether. The purpose of this paper is to subject the concept to critical evaluation and argue that tangibility/intangibility is useful, because it influences consumers' experiences with offerings. In this paper, the authors argue that it is necessary to re‐conceptualise tangibility/intangibility to overcome the previous critique.

The authors draw upon empirical research from the service marketing and psychology literature in order to advance knowledge on the nature of tangibility/intangibility and its influence on the formation of consumer experiences.

It is proposed that tangibility/intangibility should be investigated from a consumer perspective, rather than an inherent characteristic in offerings. Also, it is shown that the concept is relevant for understanding consumer experience formation at different stages of the purchase process.

The paper provides propositions on the conceptualization of tangibility/intangibility and its relationship with pre‐, ongoing use and post‐purchase consumer experiences. The authors call for caution in dismissing tangibility/intangibility as a concept in the service marketing literature.

To provide a perspective on the nature of service infusion in manufacturing companies based on a case analysis in the context of a maintenance management solution for industrial production equipment.

The paper first discusses how manufacturers becoming service providers is treated in the literature. Next, a qualitative single‐case study is reported, in which a troublesome business concept was surveyed through 35 thematic focus group interviews. The analysis revealed a set of challenges that were compared to arrive at a conclusion, the paradox.

The findings suggest that many challenges stemmed from the manufacturing‐oriented way of doing business. This further indicates that the common implicit view, that manufacturers can shift to service provision steadily, by adding service offerings to their total offering one by one, may actually be hazardous.

The limitations are based on the methodology. First, the case study focuses on only one manufacturing company, and therefore the aim of the paper is not to generalize the findings. On the other hand, the data collected for the case are rich and in‐depth in nature, and the brief reporting can only cover the tip of the iceberg. Yet, even one divergent case yields for questioning the existing beliefs, which is the aim of this study.

The paper provides an original perspective to this topical, but under‐studied, phenomenon of manufacturers increasingly providing service offerings, and brings into daylight the implicit tone of the existing research.

The previous literature has indicated that the productisation of services may play a role in service management, although a certain level of obscurity still surrounds the concept. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the meaning of service productisation (SP) as well as to contribute to a greater understanding of the concept.

An inductive analysis was applied to 13 instances of activities related to the productisation of services, with secondary data being analysed to identify practices relevant to SP and to examine their significance. The analysis is guided by an extensive literature review.

SP has been found to play a role in systematising and tangibilising a service offering and its related processes as well as in formalising the processes and service offerings. The potential elements of SP have been identified and supporting evidence has been provided. The findings indicate that SP has a specific focus on the offering and its related processes, with the aim being to create a service product that can be sold, delivered and invoiced. SP may utilise various practices and techniques, and customer orientation also plays a significant role. A typology of SP has been created by reflecting on its commercial and technical aspects.

This study has important implications for the service industry as it provides a structure and key considerations for productising services.

This study is one of the first to seek evidence for the concept of SP from multiple instances of SP as well as an extensive literature base. The typology created provides a context for discussing SP as well as reflecting on its commercial and technical aspects.

The present increasingly tough economic climate has uncovered the need to go beyond the prevailing seller‐oriented models and company practices in order to capture the factors that essentially drive buyer companies. What is needed is a genuinely customer‐side concept that corresponds to offering. The purpose of this study is to develop a new concept labeled “customer needing” which emerged from the material collected in an industrial service setting.

The paper reports a case study of a typical high‐technology industrial service with a strong outsourcing trend. The empirical data consist of interviews with eight representatives from the seller company and 16 interviews from different customer companies.

A needing is based on the customers' mental models of their business and business strategies that affect their priorities, decisions, and actions. It is itself a mental model of how the customer conceives the fulfillment of a specific task. In this paper the needing is operationalized as a profile of three dimensions containing six functions that represent desired value in use for the customer: the doing dimension comprises a relieving and an enabling function; the experiencing dimension has an energizing and a sheltering function; and the scheduling dimension contains a time‐framing and a timing function. Empirical data are presented to illustrate the new concept.

This is a case study but the ensuing concept provides a framework for further research on value in use and mental models in an industrial service setting. The studied offering was a complex business service representing an outsourced function and the buyers were functional experts and higher‐level executives, all of them experts in the service in question.

The concept of customer needing extends knowledge of value in use and consequently represents an important tool in developing successful seller offerings. The shift of focus from offering to needing can explain why some sales attempts fail and can thus reveal new business opportunities.

In addition to highlighting the mental models driving companies' priorities and behavior, the study offers insights into value in use in an industrial service setting. The concept customer needing helps to analyze and describe value in use and provides a new buyer‐side concept corresponding to the offering concept.

This paper draws on the experiences of project marketing and solution selling to improve the understanding of how to create superior value for customers. Project marketing and solution selling have both developed approaches to deal with complex marketing situations for a number of years now. The upstream mobilization of customer network actors and the downstream enlargement of the content and scope of the offering are the key features of these approaches.

This paper presents two case studies to focus attention on elements that are crucial to this twin-track approach. The downstream extension of the offering relies on services supporting the customer's action (SSC), which supplement traditional services that support the supplier's product (SSP). The upstream extension leads to an introduction to other types of services or elements of the offering – the services supporting the customer's network actors (SSCN).

Furthermore, the paper proposes a marketing process that takes the supplier's viewpoint, for whom the entire approach is a network mobilization, into account. This approach to the offering, which included SSP, SSC, and SSCN, is typical of a network strategy in which the supplier recruits and enrolls new actors to (re)model the buying center.

This marketing process is in tune with the latest developments of the service-dominant (S-D) logic, as it proposes a move from the value chain toward a value-creation network/constellation. Consequently, creating superior value for customer means mobilizing and servicing actors far beyond the boundaries of the buying center, supply chain, and customer solution net.

This study examines the impact of customer involvement (CI), technology strategy, firm internationalization and servitization on product and service innovation performance (SIP) in hybrid offerings. In addition, it investigates the moderating role of digitization and co-creation in the relationship mentioned above.

A research framework was developed through the lens of service-dominant (S-D) logic theory, and the proposed research hypotheses were empirically tested. Primary data were collected via the survey method, and structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Findings of this study suggest that the S-D logic theory effectively explains CI and servitization in hybrid offerings. Furthermore, digitization is a crucial driver of SIP. Additionally, this paper finds that co-creation moderates between servitization and innovation performance of hybrid offerings.

Besides theoretical contributions, this study presents valuable insights to manage service networks during servitization.

First, this work proposes a comprehensive framework of hybrid offerings' driving factors (i.e. CI, firm internationalization, technology strategy and servitization) and their impact on product and SIP. Second, it tests the moderating effects of digitalization and co-creation in the context of hybrid offerings.

The purpose of this study is to provide insight into characteristics of visitor demand for a regionally oriented vinotheque (wine bar and shop) at a UNESCO world heritage destination in Germany. The research especially focuses on expected offer components for a wine bar and shop, including wine-related products and services, to test the theoretical notion of blurred division between product and service offerings. The literature review has revealed that implications of this conceptual notion on wine bar and shop offer creation could be profound as there are different types of wine bar and shops with different product–service combinations. Moreover, the offer creation needs to take into account the overall needs of wine bar and shop visitors and consider them as experience seekers and not necessarily utility-maximizing players. In this sense, the paper expands previous research on vinotheques that primarily took the wine retail perspective.

The study deals with wine-related sales, offer design and the importance of tourism and hospitality for wine sales in a non-growing wine market. However, the concept of increasing wine sales through tourism and hospitality brings to the forefront the issues of creating integrated offerings of products and services. This is why, the study deploys the concepts of hybrid products and experience economy. The primary data have been collected via self-administered, paper-based questionnaire (Appendix 2) amongst visitors at the St. Goar/Loreley tourist destination. The goal has been to reveal the importance of a wine bar and shop as a wine sales channel, whether visitors are interested in visiting a wine bar and shop, what major expectations they have entering a vinotheque, as well as what major offer components of products and/or services are they interested in. Total sample size was N = 400. Major statistical procedure deployed was descriptive statistics, as well as PCA (principal component analysis) of expectations and offer analysis in regards to products and services.

By deploying the PCA on the data regarding interest in buying wine-related products and services, three offer configurations have been extracted, out of which only one is purely related to products, whilst the other two are hybrid products, meaning a combination of wine-related products and services. Relevance of architectural design illustrates that visitors also seek experience. These findings confirm previously discussed theories on the importance of integrating products and services into hybrid products and creating experience with a suitable combination of products and services.

Data collection has taken place in a confined timeframe (two summer months). No active measures have been taken to ensure the validity of the sample through quotas or similar techniques. The research sample and location are somewhat limited for making conclusions in other geographical regions, but replicating the study in different contexts can add to the comparability of the results on the level of Germany, but also internationally. The empirical evidence for superior customer value of hybrid offerings and integrating services into product-centric offer design is of paramount importance for selling wine in a highly competitive market in absence of market growth. Wine bar and shop allows to differentiate the offer by creating wine-related experience through a combination of product (wine and wine-related products), hospitality/gastronomic services and tourism services. The insights also illustrate the idea of new market opportunities via connecting converging industries.

The study contributes to close a gap identified in the literature review that German wineries lag wine-tourism activities. It provides advice in regards to offer design and hybrid offerings and an experiential experience supported by architectural design. Such an approach offers the potential to win market share in a non-growing market – an ambition of the players in the market but also an obvious challenge.

The findings contribute to regional development. Furthermore, arguments for cooperative behavior are provided. This should also help to minimize free ridership and its negative social implications.

The paper adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the creation of wine bar and shop offer. The results point out that offerings should be created around a core wine tourism product – regional and cellar door offer – and be expanded by “food design” – components, attractive architectural elements, as well as web shop services, thereby creating an advanced wine-related experience. It confirms the importance of theoretical concepts such as experience economy, hybrid products and solution provision in the case of wine bar and shop, by testing these concepts on the group of visitors at a German wine and cultural destination.

Applying both the dynamic capability and configuration theoretical perspectives, the paper showcases the role of network configuration and dynamics of hybrid offerings in both developed and emerging markets by high-tech firms.

The current paper uses an exploratory qualitative research methodology based on in-depth case studies of three Finnish high-tech firms operating in the medical technology industry globally.

The findings from the study showed that dynamic capabilities such as sensing and customer engagement along with internal coordination and adaptation capabilities are critical to the success of hybrid market offerings. Moreover, dynamic capabilities were found to be influential in those emerging and advanced international markets where case firms were less familiar with market dynamics. Moreover, the configuration of these capabilities within functional units and coordination of marketing and R&D activities can be effective for creating hybrid offerings in international markets. Ultimately, this was found to be the case even though target market selection for hybrid offerings was influenced by the level of convergence and fragmentation of the market.

Applying the configuration theory, this is one of the first studies to specifically analyze the differences in organizational network configuration changes in relation to hybrid market offerings in both developed economies and emerging economies. The findings contribute to hybrid market offering literature by pointing out that not only internal capabilities are important for enacting hybrid offerings, but the roles of ecosystems and knowledge centers are also extremely important to develop hybrid offerings. This paper also highlights the criticality of under-studied dynamic capabilities such as market sensing and customer engagement in the context of hybrid offerings in international markets. This showcases the wider role of ecosystems in enabling technology firms to develop hybrid offerings.