This paper studies how the design of digital platforms can support students' reflection on profes... more This paper studies how the design of digital platforms can support students' reflection on professional competence. The authors propose a conceptual framework for analyzing properties and functions that are relevant for digital environments for reflecting on professional competences and apply it in a study analyzing a set of existing digital platforms. The results emphasize the importance of multiple temporal vantage points in the design of the digital platforms, namely reflection-before-action (the future), in addition to the more common reflection-inaction (the present) and reflection-on-action (the past), and considers how digital environment design can support reflection from these temporal vantage points. The article offers tools to guide students in their reflection modes.
PurposeCorporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly important issue for service brand... more PurposeCorporate 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.Design/methodology/approachThe 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...
Purpose People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated pub... more Purpose People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”. Design/methodology/approach Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children. Findings This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role. Research limitations/impli...
User-defined ecosystems in health and social care, 2022
Purpose
People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated pu... more Purpose
People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.
Design/methodology/approach
Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.
Findings
This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role. Research limitations/implications
This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.
Social implications
This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.
Originality/value
This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.
The 7th AMA SERVSIG International Service Research conference was held at Hanken School of Econom... more The 7th AMA SERVSIG International Service Research conference was held at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland on June 7-9, 2012. The conference was organized by the CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management, and attracted over 250 participants from 29 countries. The first SERVSIG conference was held in 1999, and the event has since been hosted in a different country and by a different school every two years. The Services Special Interest Group (SERVSIG) was founded by Professor Ray Fisk in 1993, with the goal of serving American Marketing Association academics who have an interest in service research. This book of abstracts contains abstracts for all of the nearly 200 papers that were presented at the conference. In the call for papers, the conference committee encouraged authors to submit innovative and creative service marketing related research. This led to a rich diversity in approaches. The following are just a few of the themes represented by th...
Purpose Previous research on advertising in digital contexts has emphasized its persuasive and in... more Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual in nature and applies service logic (SL) and customer engagement to reconceptualize digital advertising and selling. Findings 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) th...
Purpose The paper aims to introduce the idea that consumers have relationships with their own rec... more Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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 demonstra...
Due to changes in technology, customers are increasingly empowered in their interactions with com... more Due to changes in technology, customers are increasingly empowered in their interactions with companies. Information is readily available, and customers can choose, learn and contribute in ways previously unimaginable. Even though marketers have acknowledged the importance of understanding the customer as an active participant in service, there have been few efforts to systematically understand and illustrate the customer’s structures of activity. Customer activity has within marketing traditionally been viewed as a response to inputs from the provider. Advertising, for example, is seen as having a persuasive function: It should result in the customer’s activity of buying. Similarly, in service research, the customer’s activities are considered to be either directed by service design or as inputs into an interaction process. This thesis presents an alternative view on customer activity: It is a perspective on service use. In contrast to earlier perspectives, the customer activity pe...
PurposeThe paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and companies ... more PurposeThe 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.Design/methodology/approachThe 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.FindingsMoving 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.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective a...
Purpose – Customer activity in service has mainly been understood within the boundaries of intera... more Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – 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. Findings – This paper defines customer activities as discrete sequences of behaviour that aim at creating or supporting some types of value in the cu...
... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1... more ... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1997) from the B-to-B network literature. Relationscapes are a firm's view of its relationship landscape, and include both active as well as potential business relationships. ...
This chapter presents a research agenda for customer activity-focused service research. Customer ... more This chapter presents a research agenda for customer activity-focused service research. Customer activities are characterized as discrete units of behavior, which customers carry out to facilitate the emergence of value in their own lives or businesses. In this context, service can be viewed as an enabling element, which customers engage in to make their own activities possible. This activity perspective on service use opens up several new and interesting research areas, such as the analysis of customer activity networks, the role of services in such networks, and the development of the customer’s activities around service use. The chapter ends with a discussion on the use of conventional and more innovative methodologies to empirically examine these topics.
Activity systems are the cognitively linked groups of activities that consumers carry out as a pa... more Activity systems are the cognitively linked groups of activities that consumers carry out as a part of their daily life. The aim of this paper is to investigate how consumers experience value through their activities, and how services fit into the context of activity systems. A new technique for illustrating consumers’ activity systems is introduced. The technique consists of identifying a consumer’s activities through an interview, then quantitatively measuring how the consumer evaluates the identified activities on three dimensions: Experienced benefits, sacrifices and frequency. This information is used to create a graphical representation of the consumer’s activity system, an “activityscape map”. Activity systems work as infrastructure for the individual consumer’s value experience. The paper contributes to value and service literature, where there currently are no clearly described standardized techniques for visually mapping out individual consumer activity. Existing approache...
PurposeThis paper aims to develop and apply a service design method that allows for stronger reco... more PurposeThis 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.Design/methodology/approachFollowing 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.FindingsThree 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.Research limitations/implicationsThe 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 ach...
The Roots and Fruits of the Nordic Consumer Research, 2010
... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1... more ... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1997) from the B-to-B network literature. Relationscapes are a firm's view of its relationship landscape, and include both active as well as potential business relationships. ...
All companies have a portfolio of customer relationships. From a managerial standpoint the value ... more All companies have a portfolio of customer relationships. From a managerial standpoint the value of these customer relationships is a key issue. The aim of the paper is to introduce a conceptual framework for customers' energy towards a service provider. Customer energy is defined as the cognitive, affective and behavioural effort a customer puts into the purchase of an offering. It is based on two dimensions: life theme involvement and relationship commitment. Data from a survey study of 425 customers of an online gambling site was ...
Purpose–This paper explores and expands the roles of customers and companies in creating value by... more Purpose–This paper explores and expands the roles of customers and companies in creating value by introducing a new a customer-based approach to service. The customer's logic is examined as being the foundation of a customer-based marketing and business logic. Design/methodology/approach–The authors argue that both goods-dominant logics and service-dominant logics are provider-dominant. Contrasting the customer-dominant logic with provider-dominant logics, the paper examines the creation of service value from ...
Purpose – The paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and compani... more Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – 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. Findings – 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. Research limitations/implications – The paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective and suggests implications for research and practice. Practical implications – 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. Originality/value – 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.
This paper studies how the design of digital platforms can support students' reflection on profes... more This paper studies how the design of digital platforms can support students' reflection on professional competence. The authors propose a conceptual framework for analyzing properties and functions that are relevant for digital environments for reflecting on professional competences and apply it in a study analyzing a set of existing digital platforms. The results emphasize the importance of multiple temporal vantage points in the design of the digital platforms, namely reflection-before-action (the future), in addition to the more common reflection-inaction (the present) and reflection-on-action (the past), and considers how digital environment design can support reflection from these temporal vantage points. The article offers tools to guide students in their reflection modes.
PurposeCorporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly important issue for service brand... more PurposeCorporate 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.Design/methodology/approachThe 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...
Purpose People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated pub... more Purpose People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”. Design/methodology/approach Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children. Findings This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role. Research limitations/impli...
User-defined ecosystems in health and social care, 2022
Purpose
People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated pu... more Purpose
People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.
Design/methodology/approach
Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.
Findings
This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role. Research limitations/implications
This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.
Social implications
This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.
Originality/value
This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.
The 7th AMA SERVSIG International Service Research conference was held at Hanken School of Econom... more The 7th AMA SERVSIG International Service Research conference was held at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland on June 7-9, 2012. The conference was organized by the CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management, and attracted over 250 participants from 29 countries. The first SERVSIG conference was held in 1999, and the event has since been hosted in a different country and by a different school every two years. The Services Special Interest Group (SERVSIG) was founded by Professor Ray Fisk in 1993, with the goal of serving American Marketing Association academics who have an interest in service research. This book of abstracts contains abstracts for all of the nearly 200 papers that were presented at the conference. In the call for papers, the conference committee encouraged authors to submit innovative and creative service marketing related research. This led to a rich diversity in approaches. The following are just a few of the themes represented by th...
Purpose Previous research on advertising in digital contexts has emphasized its persuasive and in... more Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual in nature and applies service logic (SL) and customer engagement to reconceptualize digital advertising and selling. Findings 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) th...
Purpose The paper aims to introduce the idea that consumers have relationships with their own rec... more Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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 demonstra...
Due to changes in technology, customers are increasingly empowered in their interactions with com... more Due to changes in technology, customers are increasingly empowered in their interactions with companies. Information is readily available, and customers can choose, learn and contribute in ways previously unimaginable. Even though marketers have acknowledged the importance of understanding the customer as an active participant in service, there have been few efforts to systematically understand and illustrate the customer’s structures of activity. Customer activity has within marketing traditionally been viewed as a response to inputs from the provider. Advertising, for example, is seen as having a persuasive function: It should result in the customer’s activity of buying. Similarly, in service research, the customer’s activities are considered to be either directed by service design or as inputs into an interaction process. This thesis presents an alternative view on customer activity: It is a perspective on service use. In contrast to earlier perspectives, the customer activity pe...
PurposeThe paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and companies ... more PurposeThe 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.Design/methodology/approachThe 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.FindingsMoving 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.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective a...
Purpose – Customer activity in service has mainly been understood within the boundaries of intera... more Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – 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. Findings – This paper defines customer activities as discrete sequences of behaviour that aim at creating or supporting some types of value in the cu...
... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1... more ... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1997) from the B-to-B network literature. Relationscapes are a firm's view of its relationship landscape, and include both active as well as potential business relationships. ...
This chapter presents a research agenda for customer activity-focused service research. Customer ... more This chapter presents a research agenda for customer activity-focused service research. Customer activities are characterized as discrete units of behavior, which customers carry out to facilitate the emergence of value in their own lives or businesses. In this context, service can be viewed as an enabling element, which customers engage in to make their own activities possible. This activity perspective on service use opens up several new and interesting research areas, such as the analysis of customer activity networks, the role of services in such networks, and the development of the customer’s activities around service use. The chapter ends with a discussion on the use of conventional and more innovative methodologies to empirically examine these topics.
Activity systems are the cognitively linked groups of activities that consumers carry out as a pa... more Activity systems are the cognitively linked groups of activities that consumers carry out as a part of their daily life. The aim of this paper is to investigate how consumers experience value through their activities, and how services fit into the context of activity systems. A new technique for illustrating consumers’ activity systems is introduced. The technique consists of identifying a consumer’s activities through an interview, then quantitatively measuring how the consumer evaluates the identified activities on three dimensions: Experienced benefits, sacrifices and frequency. This information is used to create a graphical representation of the consumer’s activity system, an “activityscape map”. Activity systems work as infrastructure for the individual consumer’s value experience. The paper contributes to value and service literature, where there currently are no clearly described standardized techniques for visually mapping out individual consumer activity. Existing approache...
PurposeThis paper aims to develop and apply a service design method that allows for stronger reco... more PurposeThis 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.Design/methodology/approachFollowing 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.FindingsThree 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.Research limitations/implicationsThe 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 ach...
The Roots and Fruits of the Nordic Consumer Research, 2010
... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1... more ... The term activityscape is inspired by Strandvik and Törnroos' relationscapes(1997) from the B-to-B network literature. Relationscapes are a firm's view of its relationship landscape, and include both active as well as potential business relationships. ...
All companies have a portfolio of customer relationships. From a managerial standpoint the value ... more All companies have a portfolio of customer relationships. From a managerial standpoint the value of these customer relationships is a key issue. The aim of the paper is to introduce a conceptual framework for customers' energy towards a service provider. Customer energy is defined as the cognitive, affective and behavioural effort a customer puts into the purchase of an offering. It is based on two dimensions: life theme involvement and relationship commitment. Data from a survey study of 425 customers of an online gambling site was ...
Purpose–This paper explores and expands the roles of customers and companies in creating value by... more Purpose–This paper explores and expands the roles of customers and companies in creating value by introducing a new a customer-based approach to service. The customer's logic is examined as being the foundation of a customer-based marketing and business logic. Design/methodology/approach–The authors argue that both goods-dominant logics and service-dominant logics are provider-dominant. Contrasting the customer-dominant logic with provider-dominant logics, the paper examines the creation of service value from ...
Purpose – The paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and compani... more Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – 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. Findings – 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. Research limitations/implications – The paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective and suggests implications for research and practice. Practical implications – 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. Originality/value – 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.
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Papers by Jacob Mickelsson
People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.
Design/methodology/approach
Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.
Findings
This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role.
Research limitations/implications
This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.
Social implications
This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.
Originality/value
This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.
People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.
Design/methodology/approach
Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.
Findings
This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role.
Research limitations/implications
This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.
Social implications
This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.
Originality/value
This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.