Service as business logic: implications for value creation and marketing

The purpose of this article is to analyze the scope, content and nature of value co‐creation in a service logic‐based view of value creation, addressing the customer's perspective in a supplier‐customer relationship. The nature of the activities and the roles of the supplier and the customer in value creation and co‐creation are analyzed. Furthermore, the purpose is to discuss what implications for marketing can be derived from this analysis.

The article analyzes the marketing implications that follow from the pivotal role of interactions in service provision. The article, thus, builds on a long history in service marketing research pointing at the impact on the content and scope of marketing of customer‐supplier interactions.

In this article, it is concluded that creating customer value is a multilaned process consisting of two conceptually distinct subprocesses. These are the supplier's process of providing resources for customer's use and the customer's process of turning service into value. The article results in five service logic theses which provide an understanding of the process of value creation and its implications for marketing. The theses offer a terminology that helps researchers and practitioners to understand the various roles of suppliers and customers in value creation and to analyze opportunities for co‐creation of value.

The findings of this article challenge some of the salient propositions of the emerging service‐dominant logic, i.e. customers as co‐creators of value, and firms can only make value propositions. The role of marketing is reframed beyond its conventional borders.