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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.

In this study, we examined the degree to which integrated marketing communication (IMC) might be manifested in services advertising. Using one of Lovelock’s typologies of services as a framework for classifying different services with respect to their tangibility, we examined ads in each of four service product categories to assess advertisers’ efforts to address the tangibility of service offerings via IMC. We found few differences with regard to incorporation of IMC across four service types, with the exception that services advertisements that reflected tangible acts (lawn care, hairstyling) were more highly integrated than services ads for intangible acts (education, retailing, banking). Results are discussed in terms of the implications for developing better services advertising.

The majority of past classification models for services have failed to account for the different nature of online services, and therefore, they are not helpful in classifying online services. This paper aims to present a new model for classifying online services, and managerial implications for creating customer loyalty to online service organizations are discussed.

This paper presents an overview of the research in service classifications and a classification model for online services based on a review of the services literature.

The model for online services presented in this paper classifies online services into four categories: online mass services, online mass e-tailing services, online professional and personal services and online service shops.

The classification of online services has received very limited research attention; yet, online services represent a rapidly growing area. The model presented in this paper provides a foundation for the further study and research of online services.

This vision article alerts service managers to the potential of cognitive computing to reframe their value propositions. Humans are bounded in three ways: perception, rationality and physicality. Cognitive computing, hardware or software that transcends these three limits, offers many opportunities to improve the performance of service systems, in particular those focused on customer engagement. The intangibility spectrum is presented as a mental model for service managers to consider how to use cognitive computing to support augmenting their value proposition by moving across the spectrum.

Three frameworks are integrated: a five systems framework, a system's impact classification of types of cognitive computing and a tangibility spectrum.

Three examples illustrate the potential value of this integrative approach for service management.

This is the first integration of these frameworks, and two of them are the result of the first author's research.

The marketing literature suggests that product intangibility is positively associated with perceived risk and the intangibility construct encompasses three dimensions: physical intangibility, mental intangibility, and generality. The purpose of this research is to test which dimension of the intangibility construct is the most correlated with perceived risk. A survey was conducted and structural equation modeling analyses were used to test the proposed model. Results show that the mental dimension of intangibility accounts for more variance in the perceived risk construct than the other two dimensions, even when knowledge and involvement are included as moderators. Hence, the challenge for marketers might not be so much to reduce risk by physically tangibilizing goods and services, as has been advised for the past two decades, as rather to mentally tangibilize their offerings.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the concept of engagement platforms and the theories of co-creation of value to analyze the purchase as a context for customers to co-create their own experiences. Specifically, the paper proposes that including online cues related to Customer to customer (C2C) interactions and coproduction in the engagement platform determines customer co-creation experiences. Moreover, the paper tests for the relationship between the co-creation experience and customer's purchase intentions.

An online platform was designed and a purchase situation was simulated, in which the participants were asked to buy a pair of sneakers. To make the experience more realistic, participants could navigate and undertake activities related to the available cues, thus obtaining a direct experience of the possibilities of the platform. Structural equation modeling analyses were used to test the hypothesized relationships.

The results confirm the importance of including cues related to C2C interactions and coproduction in order to increase co-creation experience possibilities for the customer during the online purchase. Moreover, if customers perceive that they are co-creating the experience, their purchase intentions increase.

This paper addresses the importance of virtual engagement platforms as touch points for interaction and the importance of their characteristics for facilitating co-creation. These platforms provide customers with cues that promote their participation, the establishment of collaborative relationships and the co-creation of the purchase experience.

There is a growing interest in understanding how customers interact with firms to co-create experiences and in the influence of IT-related service in this process. Nevertheless, to date, the online purchase experience as a co-creation context has not been fully investigated.

Sacrifice, integral to gift giving, remains unexplored and undertheorized in marketing. This paper aims to address this shortfall by analyzing the dynamics of sacrifice and theorizing how it serves as an engine of the gift chimney.

The ethnographic investigation of public ceremonial gift giving in sectarian Northern Ireland describes and interprets the complex nature of the gift.

The authors show that sacrifice is a plausible mechanism of the gift chimney and that the co-occurrence of monadic, dyadic and systemic giving in the same ritual acts as an accelerant.

The authors analyze how public ceremonial gift giving induces sectarian communities to risk convocation, enabling them to exorcize trauma sustained at one another’s hands and to build a platform for future cross-community cohesion in a context of ineffective institutional efforts.

Sacrifice propels circulation of the gift, creating a social bond between antagonists whose ethos of mutuality depends upon ritualized reciprocal recognition of entangled loss.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the process by which piggybacking partners attempt to overcome the challenges of interfirm diversity when entering foreign markets.

The authors present a longitudinal case study following the collaboration between a rider (a small software developer) and carrier (a global player in software solution distribution) as a means of co-creating value for global customers in the pharmaceutical industry.

The authors find that despite differential size and incongruent organizational cultures, top managers were still initially able to facilitate collaboration through various knowledge-sharing initiatives, but that these efforts were subsequently undermined by middle managers (due to misaligned incentives), which prevented both parties from reaping the gains of piggybacking on global markets.

The findings have a number of implications for academics and practitioners alike. Theoretical implications include treating piggybacking as a special case of indirect exporting with particular challenges for knowledge exchange and trust building.

The authors offer managerial implications for reconciling divergent organizational cultures, partner selection and incentive alignment.

This appears to be the first paper to empirically assess the viability of piggybacking as a foreign entry mode by examining the crucial processes of knowledge sharing and trust development within piggybacking arrangements.

This study aims to explore the impact of system quality dimensions, namely, ease of use, accessibility, interactivity and website innovativeness on service quality (SQ) and customer satisfaction.

The study used a quantitative approach, by using a survey method. The unit of analysis was the individual. A total of 618 questionnaires were randomly distributed to university students and staff in Jordan. The partial least square path-modeling method was used in the estimation of causal relationships of the constructs examined in the study.

The outcomes of this study showed that ease of use, interactivity and website innovativeness have significant positive relationships with the SQ. Consequently, SQ significantly influences customer satisfaction.

Limitations of this research were related to the unit of analysis, as it was conducted within the geographical region of Jordan and the university context, where the culture and level of the technological advancement may be different than other countries.

This research can assist mobile commerce (m-commerce) service policymakers to formulate significant policies that could enhance the nature of services being rendered and thus bring greater benefits to the customers.

This research has extended the body of knowledge on emerging trends in m-commerce innovation adoption, more specifically in the university context. Furthermore, it offers insight on the importance of m-commerce in the minds of customers, in such a way that it will bring about the intention to repeat patronage in the future.

The authors explore neuro-enhanced reality (NeR) as a novel approach for enhancing service communication between customers, frontline employees, and service organizations that extends beyond current state-of-the-art approaches based on augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies.

The authors first take stock of research on reality-enhanced service communication with AR and VR, then complement these insights with emerging neuroscientific research to conceptualize how NeR enables innovative forms of service communication. On this basis, the authors develop a research agenda to guide the future study and managerial exploitation of NeR.

AR and VR already offer unique affordances for digital-to-physical communication, but these can be extended with NeR. Specifically, NeR supports neuro-to-digital and digital-to-neuro communication based on neuroimaging (e.g. controlling digital content through thought) and neurostimulation (e.g. eliciting brain responses based on digital content). This provides a basis for outlining possible applications of NeR across service settings.

The authors advance knowledge on reality-enhanced service communication with AR and VR, whilst also demonstrating how neuroscientific research can be extended from understanding brain activity to generating novel service interactions.