Christian Grönroos

Hanken School of Economics · Department of Marketing

Purpose This paper aims to develop an alternative perspective on marketing informed by service scholarship to resolve marketing’s challenges as a discipline and practice. Design/methodology/approach This paper is conceptual and builds on the ongoing debate regarding marketing’s challenges and on service research to develop a new alternative market...

Purpose In servitization research, there has been a call to move further toward the development of business models based on a service approach. This article aims to answer this call by adopting service logic (SL) and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a service-centric business model called servification, def...

Purpose A small group of pioneering founders led the creation and early evolution of the service research field. Decades later, this article shares timeless service wisdom from ten of those pioneering founders. Design/methodology/approach Bowen and Fisk specified three criteria by which to identify a pioneering founder. In total, 11 founders met t...

Marketing is commonly considered to be in crisis, losing credibility and in need of reform. Among the many attempts to solve its predicament, one question seems not to be asked: Could there be underlying foundational assumptions that are outdated, and which hinder marketing from being re-invented to fit emergent business and societal challenges? Th...

Purpose The purpose of this study is twofold. First, this study proposes to investigate the impact of inter-functional value co-creation (VCC) in a manufacturing firm’s value chain on supply chain performance, considering the moderating role of external integration. Second, this study proposes to validate a modified version of the VCC considering t...

Purpose This 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/approach Following a discussion of different service design perspectives and activity theory, the paper develops a method called ac...

Purpose Previous research reports mixed results regarding the performance impact of servitization in manufacturing firms. To resolve this, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptually consistent and comprehensive measurement framework for both dimensions, servitization and its performance effect, and apply in a configurational analysis to...

Value is an important part of the service literature, which increasingly recognizes that value cocreation is a process. The literature on the entire value process remains limited, however, with a lack of empirical evidence on how value is (co)created and what the different activities of service providers and customers are. Addressing this situation...

Purpose - The definition of value adopted by the current service perspective on marketing theory is value as value-in-use. Surprisingly, however, little attention has been given to the question of what constitutes value-in-use for customers in service contexts? Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide an empirical account of value-in-use from...

Purpose This paper aims to emphasize two key research priorities central to the domain of service marketing. Design/methodology/approach Personal reflections. Findings It is observed that research into marketing and into service as an object of marketing, or as an offering, has been neglected for two decades and more. It is also shown that to res...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to validate the higher education service quality (HESQUAL) scale using a confirmatory approach and test an improved structural model that predicts student loyalty from image, perceived value, satisfaction and service quality. In addition to validating the HESQUAL scale using a confirmatory approach, two other ma...

Purpose Although health-care features prominently in transformative service research, there is little to guide service providers on how to improve well-being and social change transformations. This paper aims to explore actor-level interactions in transformative services, proposing that actors’ complementary health service literacy roles are fundam...

This article discusses what service management and the logic of service (SL) can offer to public service management. There are no real inbuilt differences between public and private service organizations and no reasons why public service organizations (PSOs) would be less efficient and less service-focussed and oriented towards service users than p...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to accelerate research related to the employee-facets of service management by summarizing current developments in multiple research streams, providing propositions, and articulating new directions for theory and empirical inquiry. Design/methodology/approach Seven scholars provide short reviews of the core top...

To develop a managerially relevant understanding of value and value creation, these phenomena must be analysed on a micro level. Seen from above, they lack a microfoundation. In the present article, value and value creation are discussed from a micro position, based on a service logic (SL) analysis of the service perspective on business and marketi...

Purpose This paper seeks to record the author’s personal reflections on his career as a marketing scholar. Design/methodology/approach Personal reflections in an autobiographical approach. Findings The author’s career as student, teacher, and scholar is described in some detail. Originality/value The paper records events and memories that mi...

Purpose This research examines whether explicitly communicating the customer’s resource integrating role in value propositions improves or diminishes value proposition effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach Based on existing research on value propositions, three effectiveness criteria are used: role clarity, expected customer value and purch...

In marketing, service and relationships interrelate. Service is based on relationships between actors, and according to the Nordic school research tradition, relationship marketing cannot be implemented without service. The development of service logic in the literature emphasizes that adopting a service perspective on their business and marketing...

Purpose This paper aims to develop the foundation of a model for assessing relationship marketing readiness (RMR) and provide directions for such an assessment. Design/methodology/approach Based on the promise theory and service logic, the importance of the customer–firm touchpoints and interactions to relationship marketing as an equivalent to th...

Purpose This conceptual paper aims at developing a customer-centric marketing communications approach that takes the starting point in the customer ecosystem. Design/methodology/approach After a critical analysis of existing marketing communications and integrated marketing communication (IMC) approaches, a customer-driven view of marketing commun...

Purpose This paper aims to evaluate the findings first put forward in the article “Internationalization strategies for services” (Grönroos, 1999) with the benefit of hindsight and to offer directions for further research and developments in this research area. Design/methodology/approach Research directions spurred by the publication of the origin...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a framework – the Relationality Framework – for elaborating relational behaviour, in response to calls to address the ontological weaknesses identified in the extant value and value creation literature. Design/methodology/approach – The social philosophical understanding of interaction as an organi...

Purpose – The field of service research has devoted considerable attention to the customer's role as value creator, but there is a lack of research on understanding customers' psychological processes in value creation. This paper highlights the importance of psychological distance in value-creation processes. Psychological distance is the customer'...

Adaptation in sales is common in business relationships. The purpose of this study is to understand how the buyer–seller relationship affects sellers' sales process adaptation to customers' buying processes. The results reveal how the buyer–seller relationship orientation affects sales process adaptation and its effects. The main sources of informa...

Purpose The purpose of the study is to explore how service marketing knowledge is applied in practice. It introduces some ideas about how to bridge the gap between scholarly knowledge and business practices, and thereby opens up the conversation between service marketing scholars and management practitioners. Design/methodology/approach This quali...

Over the last few years, we have seen a tremendous rise in the use of value co-creation as a concept in academic marketing and service contexts. Value co-creation generally refers to the mechanisms of interplay and collaboration between service providers and customers, resulting in experienced value for the parties. In this paper, we reflect on the...

Purpose – 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: p...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explore and analyze the implications of reverse use of customer data for service-based business models. In their quest for competitive advantage, firms traditionally use customer data as resources to redesign and develop new products and services or identify the most profitable customers. However, in the sh...

In business relationships, the seller is often expected to adapt to the buyer. The main purpose of this study is to understand how business firms adapt their sales processes to the buyer. The resulting framework, which reveals how different modes of adaptation are contingent upon the type of product being purchased, includes three layers: sales pro...

Purpose – The service management literature emphasizes the importance of communication, but language difficulties can make communicating in business settings more difficult. This paper addresses consumer willingness to communicate in a second language to identity the antecedents that drive consumer language preferences. Design/methodology/approach...

This paper aims to bridge recent work on Service Logic with practice and research in the Design for Service to explore whether and how human-centered collaborative design approaches could provide a source for interpreting existing service systems and proposing new ones and thus realize a Service Logic in organizations. A comparison is made of exist...

Purpose – The purpose of this conceptual paper is to analyse the implications generated by a service perspective. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual analysis of two approaches to understanding service perspectives, service logic (SL) and service-dominant logic (SDL), reveals direct and indirect marketing implications. Findings – The SDL i...

Purpose – Marketing researchers continue to debate the significance of the managerial relevance of marketing, especially in the boardrooms. Despite a growing number of published papers on the topic, it is surprising that there are virtually none on mental models. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – T...

Purpose – The article aims to explore hybrid consumption behaviour as an emergent consumption pattern that may make conventional consumer stereotypes outdated. Design/methodology/approach – The study is an exploratory study in urban environments using qualitative, semi-structured and semi-structured interviews. Findings – It is found that a conti...

Because extant literature on the service logic of marketing is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation, the roles of both service providers and customers remain analytically unspecified, without a theoretically sound foundation for value creation or co-creation. This article analyzes value creation and co-creation in services by analy...

Purpose This article aims to bridge recent work on Service Logic with practice and research in Design for Service to explore if and how human-centered participatory design approaches could provide an ideal source for interpreting existing service systems, proposing new ones and thus realize service logic in organizations. Design/methodology...

Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic asserts that firms and customers always co-create value. This article argues that the co-creation of value term, as used by Vargo and Lusch (2008), is strongly metaphorical in its construction, and this metaphoric form acts as a barrier to focused empirical analysis. An alternative conceptualisation is offered. It is ar...

The service encounter depends on the interaction between consumer and company, with an active role for the consumer as a participant. Building on existing literature, this article argues that language influences how consumers perceive the service encounter in several important ways. In turn, service providers and service researchers must understand...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer a reflective account of the emergence of new marketing theory as seen through the lens of the Nordic School of Service. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on documents and the authors' self-lived history and current involvement (“management action research”). Findings – Northern European...

Purpose Relationship is based on the idea of creating a win‐win situation for parties involved in a business engagement. The purpose of the article is to develop a model of mutual value creation and reciprocal return on relationships (ROR R ) assessment, which enables calculation of joint and separate gains from a relational business engagement. D...

Because extant literature on the service logic of marketing is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation, the roles of both service providers and customers remain analytically unspecified, without a theoretically sound foundation for value creation or co-creation. This article analyzes value creation and co-creation in service by analyt...

The underpinning logic of value co-creation in service logic is analyzed. It is observed that some of the ten foundational premises of the so-called service-dominant logic do not fully support an understanding of value-co-creation and creation in a way that is meaningful for theoretical development and decision making in business and marketing prac...

Purpose 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. F...

Adopting a service perspective or logic on business directs suppliers' focus in business relationships towards engaging with their customers' business processes. The purpose of this article is to analyze implications for value creation and marketing of adopting a service logic in business relationships. In the article it is demonstrated that a serv...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to create a framework for measuring mutually created value in business relationships in the manufacturing sector, which also enables suppliers and customers to share this value between themselves. Design/methodology/approach The starting point is that manufacturing firms adopt a service perspective or logic for...

There is a significant literature on market orientation. However, the effects of an economic downturn on firms' inclination to become more market oriented have not been studied. During the winter 2010, actions of large and middle-size firms in Finland during the recent economic developments were studied, with an aim to find out whether such an incl...

Purpose In today's competitive markets where market offerings are far more complicated and customer interfaces are far broader than conventional marketing models assume, marketing has become increasingly tactical and lost control of the customer management process. The purpose of this paper is to develop a promise management‐based approach to marke...

Using as a starting-point the model of integrated marketing communication (IMC), which is based on the tenet that the company integrates the marketing message conveyed to the consumer, this paper switches the focus by highlighting the consumer's message integration. A review of the marketing communication literature on meaning creation uncovered fo...

The discussion of a service-dominant logic has made the findings of decades of service marketing research a topic of interest for marketing at large. Some fundamental aspects of the logic such as value creation and its marketing implications are more complex than they have been treated as so far and need to be further developed to serve marketing t...

The underpinning logic of value co-creation in service logic is analysed. It is observed that three of the ten foundational premises of the so-called service-dominant logic are problematic and do not support an understanding of value-co-creation and creation that is meaningful for theoretical development and decision making in business and marketin...

Purpose In the discussion on service‐dominant logic and its consequences for value creation and marketing the inner meaning of the value‐in‐use notion and the nature of service marketing have not been considered thoroughly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the meaning of a service logic as a logic for consumption and provision, respectively,...

Relationship marketing has increased in importance during the past decades. We suggest that different types of relationships exist, and propose a relationship continuum, in which the customer advances from having a relationship with a product to having one with the firm, leading to commitment towards the firm. By targeting the right type of custome...

Services are processes where customers take part in the process. A customer and a service provider interact with each other and as a result of these interactions service for the customers emerges. Both the service provider and the customer co-create value for the latter. The service provider’s role is to develop the right circumstances for value-su...

Scholarly research has produced conceptual knowledge that is based on real-life marketing phenomena. An initial aim of past research has been to produce marketing knowledge as a base for efficient business operation and for the improvement of productivity. Thus, an assumption has been that the knowledge would be applied by organisations. This study...

The American Marketing Association has updated its marketing definition and included value for customers and customer relationships in the new definition. Moreover, marketing is defined as one organizational function. Taking mainly service and relationship marketing research as a starting point, this present article broadens the discussion to a gen...

Following the article by Vargo and Lusch (2004) the use of a service- dominant logic has become an international topic for discussion. In the present article, following the research tradition of the Nordic School the contribution of service marketing to marketing at large is discussed. In this article a service logic is compared to a goods logic. I...

The goods-dominated marketing model has major shortcomings as a guiding marketing theory. Its marketing mix approach is mainly geared towards buying and does not include consumption as an integral part of marketing theory. Although it is during the process of consuming goods and services that value is generated for customers and the foundation for...

In order to bring insight into the emerging concept of relationship communication, concepts from two research traditions will be combined in this paper. Based on those concepts a new model, the dynamic relationship communication model, will be presented. Instead of a company perspective focusing on the integration of outgoing messages such as adver...

American Marketing Association has updated its marketing definition, including value and customer relationships in the new definition. In the present article the underpinning logic of the updated definition is analysed. It is concluded that although it still dominates the management and marketing literature, the value concept used in the definition...

The goal of this preface is to describe how the special section on customer relationship management (CRM) was developed. In May 2003, Richard Staelin, Executive Director of the Teradata Center for Customer Relationship Management at Duke University, proposed that Journal of Marketing (JM) publish a special section. The proposal included activities...

The productivity of a process is related to how effectively input resources are transformed into value for customers. For the needs of manufacturers of physical products, there are widely used productivity concepts and measurements instruments. However, in service processes, the underlying assumptions of these concepts and models do not hold. For e...

Service firms are recognising the strategic importance of and the benefits associated with integrated relationship communications with customers. Based on the results of a 5-year research study, this article presents a trimodal conceptualisation of relationship communication that highlights the process of value generation in a relational context. T...

The objective of the article is to discuss a framework of central processes in relationship marketing. The framework includes an interaction process as the core, a planned communication process as the marketing communications support through distinct communications media, and a customer value process as the outcome of relationship marketing. If the...

The productivity of a process is related to how effectively input resources are transformed into value for customers. For the needs of manufacturers of physical products there are widely used productivity concepts and measurements instruments. However, in service processes the underlying assumptions of these concepts and models do not hold. For exa...

The marketing mix and its 4Ps have remained the marketing paradigm for decades. In the article it is argued that the foundation for this paradigm is weak and that it has had negative effects on marketing research and practice. Contemporary research into services marketing and industrial marketing demonstrates that a new approach to marketing is req...

The Internet not only changes the way customers interact with companies, but it also creates opportunities for entirely new categories of services. Many of these new services are offered as free supplements, with the purpose of adding value to the complete offering and tying customers closer to the company. However, services are only as valuable as...

Compares traditional marketing models to service marketing models, stating that the most important characteristic of services is the fact that services are processes, not things. A service firm has no products, only interactive processes. Whereas the consumption of physical products can be described as “outcome consumption”, the consumption of serv...

Contributes to the development of a model of Internet offerings, labelled the NetOffer model, by analysing data from an Internet‐based case, cinema ticket sales on the Internet. The objective is not to test hypotheses about Internet offerings, but to develop an understanding of the nature of such offerings. The study shows that although Internet of...

A relationship dialogue is a process of reasoning together in order for two or more parties to develop a common knowledge platform. Relationship marketing is facilitated provided that this knowledge platform enables a supplier to create additional value for its customers on top of the value of the goods and services which are exchanged in the relat...

This article presents the results of an exploratory study which aimed to develop a new framework for understanding post-purchase word-of-mouth in a relationship context. New insights into word-of-mouth communication in the relationship context were also attempted by applying the concept of post-decisional cognitive dissonance to this framework. The...

Relationship marketing has been offered as a new marketing paradigm. However, a relationship approach to marketing challenges many fundamental cornerstones of marketing, such as the definition of marketing variables, the marketing department as a useful organizational solution, marketing planning as an effective way of planning marketing resources...

Discusses some key challenges for service firms planning to go abroad and presents five different types of internationalization strategies for services, none of which are mutually exclusive. These are: direct export of services in terms of repairs and maintenance that are most appropriate to industrial markets; systems export that is a joint export...

Services are processes, and hence service firms do not offer products that are comparable to preproduced bundles of physical resources and features that are provided by manufacturing companies. Instead the outcome of the process is an integral part of the service process which is consumed by customers as a solution to perceived problems. Thus the u...

In mainstream textbooks modern marketing is regarded as being based on the marketing concept and to include management-oriented activities that revolve around the marketing mix and its four Ps. The needs and wants of the customers are established through market research, and in this way the customer input into the marketing planning and implementat...

Marketing from a relational perspective, or relationship marketing, requires that a firm offers more resources and activities than a core product (goods or services) in order to satisfy the long‐term value needs of its customers. In the present article a value‐driven approach to how such long‐term needs are fulfilled is discussed. The analysis goes...

Discusses the nature and sometimes negative consequences of the dominating marketing paradigm of today, marketing mix management, and furthermore discusses how modern research into, for example, industrial marketing and services marketing as well as customer relationship economics shows that another approach to marketing is required. This developme...

In modern Western economic history, the industrial revolution and the evolution of scientific management helped society to achieve other important goals and turned relationship thinking into a secondary issue. A mass-market orientation and the establishment of the middle-man in distribution channels, as well as specialisation and the division of la...

Discusses the logic of the re-emerging relationship approach to marketing and presents key strategic as well as tactical implications for a firm attempting to apply a relationship marketing strategy. Notes that major changes in the business philosophy may be required if relationship marketing is truly to be adopted. Otherwise the firm may just be p...

The value concept is a basic constituent of relationship marketing. The ability to provide superior value to customers is a prerequisite when trying to establish and maintain long-term customer relationships. Stresses the fact that the underlying construct of customer satisfaction is more than a perception of the quality received. What must be take...