Elina Jaakkola

University of Turku | UTU · Turku School of Economics, Department of Marketing and International Business

This paper examines the collaborative process of value co-creation in the context of knowledge intensive business services. Through 120 qualitative interviews with suppliers and buyers of knowledge intensive services, the extensive exploratory study analyzes the activities, roles and resources of buyers and suppliers in the reciprocal value co-crea...

Recent developments in marketing and service research highlight the blurring of boundaries between firms and customers. The concept of customer engagement (CE) aggregates the multiple ways customer behaviors beyond transactions may influence the firm. However, the term is embryonic and academics and practitioners alike lack understanding on how CE...

The rising impact of customer engagement is increasingly evident in business markets. This paper studies customer referencing as an important manifestation of engagement behavior in the business-to-business (B2B) context. To extend extant research, which has thus far examined referencing almost exclusively from the seller's viewpoint, we study how...

Although previous research has demonstrated that many critical success factors for new service development (NSD) relate to how the NSD function is organized, few attempts have been made to examine the organizational arrangements for NSD in more detail. This study explores what kind of organization structures firms use for NSD, and what implications...

Purpose The extant new service development (NSD) literature tends to assume that the key practices for NSD identified in one context apply for all services, and has failed to sufficiently consider differences in NSD between service types. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of NSD across different service types. Design/methodology/a...

The business-to-business (B2B) customer experience (CX) literature tends to promote a one-size-fits-all approach, advocating the undifferentiated goal of exceptional CX with the view that 'more is better' in CX management (CXM). In contrast, we identify three universal customer goal categories and their associated CXM value propositions that underp...

Purpose Existing research on customer journeys has tended to focus on the customer’s purchase decision-making and firm-controlled touchpoints, overlooking indirect touchpoints where customer resources and behaviors influence the firm and other actors, beyond financial patronage. This article develops the concept of engagement journeys and discusses...

In the last decade, customer engagement has become a key concept in service research. While the customer engagement literature has gained significant traction and is maturing, studies have predominantly focused on hedonic consumption contexts, such as social media platforms or brand communities. We argue that hedonic and utilitarian service service...

Service-dominant logic (S-D logic), proposed by Vargo and Lusch in 2004, focuses on value co-creation through service exchange. For the last 20 years, S-D logic has developed into a metatheoretical framework that transcends traditional marketing sub-disciplines and provides a holistic view of markets. The editorial aims to provide an update on the...

Purpose Service managers increasingly strive to achieve sustainability through strategies centered on circularity. With a focus on saving, extending and (re)generating resources and their enclosing service systems, circularity can contribute to environmental, social and financial gains. Yet, the notion of circularity is surprisingly understudied in...

Marketing practitioners and consultants have widely adopted the concept of customer journeys for use in analyzing contemporary B2B customer behavior, but despite this concept's potential, research on B2B customer journeys remains in its infancy. This study conceptualizes the B2B customer journey by synthesizing research on customer journeys, B2B pu...

Many marketing phenomena involve a group’s collective experiences; however, marketing research largely focuses on an individual’s experiences. This research argues that individual-level theorizing alone is inadequate to capture collective experiences, such as how families, teams, or business customers experience good and/or services. This article t...

Fundamental shifts in business-to-business (B2B) buying behavior make digital content marketing (DCM) a strategic priority for vendors, though firms struggle to achieve its full potential, as a customer-centric marketing approach. To address important knowledge gaps in extant research, this study identifies key activities for realizing customer-cen...

This chapter offers a state-of-the art overview on what customer experience is, how it emerges, and how it can be managed in service contexts. The chapter outlines the research background and alternative conceptualizations of customer experience, discussed from two perspectives: first, how experiences emerge from the customer’s perspective, along a...

Omnichannel literature largely assumes that retailers should integrate touchpoints across channels to promote seamless experiences. This paper challenges this assumption by exploring how perceived journey integration affects customer experience in omnichannel retailing. A qualitative study reveals that two dimensions of journey integration—consiste...

Although the impact of marketing is a recognized priority, current academic practices do not fully support this goal. A research manuscript’s likely influence is difficult to evaluate prior to publication, and audiences differ in their understandings of what “impact” means. This article develops a set of criteria for assessing and enhancing a publi...

Purpose - Actor experience is a central concept in service-dominant (S-D) logic as value is always phenomenologically determined by a beneficiary. Due to the actor-to-actor (A2A) perspective, these beneficiaries can be individual (e.g., a customer) or collective actors (e.g., families, firms, nations). As phenomenology focuses on experiences of ind...

Although recent literature on market shaping highlights the importance of actors' engagement dispositions and behaviors and their interplay with institutional work, little is understood about the mechanisms that facilitate the institutionalization of engagement dispositions and behaviors within the market-shaping process. Beyond this backdrop, this...

Many services are difficult to understand and communicate, and as a result, difficult to position, differentiate, and sell. While important, understanding services as well-defined products has hardly received research attention although doing so offers a host of potential benefits. This conceptual article makes the following contributions. First, i...

Services are often difficult to understand and communicate, and as a result, difficult to position, differentiate, and sell. While important, understanding services as well-defined products has hardly received research attention although doing so offers a host of potential benefits. This conceptual article makes the following contributions. First,...

Purpose The quality of the customer journey has become a critical determinant of successful service delivery in contemporary business. Extant journey research focuses on the customer path to purchase, but pays less attention to the touchpoints related to service delivery and consumption that are key for understanding customer experiences in service...

Business-to-business (B2B) research is interdisciplinary in nature. A key element of interdisciplinarity is integration or combination of ideas, perspectives, and/or methods from different disciplines oriented toward producing new knowledge. However, domain silos often keep researchers focused on similar problems, methods, and theories over time. T...

Many services are difficult to understand and communicate, and as a result, difficult to position, differentiate, and sell. While important, understanding services as well-defined products has hardly received research attention although doing so offers a host of potential benefits. This conceptual article makes the following contributions. First, i...

We examine practice disengagement as a transformational consumption journey, rather than a singular decision/behavior. Our qualitative data reveal that the practices consumers strive to cease are embedded within dynamic systems of practices. Consumers' transformational journeys require practice reconfiguration among practice elements (materials, me...

Purpose: Customer experience research predominantly anchors the customer journey on a specific offering, implying an inherently firm-centric perspective. Attending calls for a more customer-centric approach, this study aims to develop a goal-oriented view of customer journeys. Design/methodology/approach: This study interprets the results of a ph...

Purpose Customer experience research predominantly anchors the customer journey on a specific offering, implying an inherently firm-centric perspective. Attending calls for a more customer-centric approach, this study aims to develop a goal-oriented view of customer journeys. Design/methodology/approach This study interprets the results of a pheno...

Purpose: Combining institutional work and actor engagement (AE) literature, this paper aims to elucidate how the collective action of market shaping occurs through the interplay between market shapers' institutional work and engagement of other market actors. While markets are shaped by actors' purposive actions, and recent literature notes the nee...

Robust conceptual frameworks are essential to building academic knowledge. Theory development involves high-quality conceptualization that integrates and builds on existing knowledge, possibly using a multi-disciplinary approach. Further, especially in an applied research area such as business-to-business marketing, the emerging theory will have me...

As a powerful means of theory building, conceptual articles are increasingly called for in marketing academia. However, researchers struggle to design and write non-empirical articles because of the lack of commonly accepted templates to guide their development. The aim of this paper is to highlight methodological considerations for conceptual pape...

Paper available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-019-00718-x Customer experience is a key marketing concept, yet the growing number of studies focused on this topic has led to considerable fragmentation and theoretical confusion. To move the field forward, this article develops a set of fundamental premises that reconcile contr...

Customer experience (CX), usually defined as customer responses to the customer journey, has become one of the central focuses in marketing literature and practice. Current research focuses on the purchase journey, predominantly on firm-controlled touchpoints. We argue that this focus hinders the understanding of the emergence of CX in two ways: fi...

Purpose-To understand how value is created, marketing scholars increasingly highlight the role of institutions and institutional arrangements that guide the assessment of value. However, customers are embedded in several institutional arrangements that may offer distinct prescriptions for actors' behavior and frame for sensemaking (i.e., institutio...

Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing. Despite extensive scholarly investigations and managerial interest though, considerations of customer engagement and emotional connections in business marketing have been scant. Researchers tend to focus on individual-level engagement, which is conceptually inadequate to address the...

Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing. Despite extensive scholarly investigations and managerial interest though, considerations of customer engagement and emotional connections in business marketing have been scant. Researchers tend to focus on individual-level engagement, which is conceptually inadequate to address the...

Considerable managerial and academic interest has made engagement a key priority in marketing and service research, spurring a rapidly increasing body of literature on this topic. Academic research initially explored customer engagement (CE) and customer engagement behavior within the firm-customer dyad. Recent developments suggest a need to broade...

Purpose Customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction plays a significant role in service. The purpose of this paper is to identify the drivers that motivate customers to interact with other customers, the interactions through which customers affect other customers and the value outcomes of C2C interactions for the participants. Design/methodology/approa...

Service dominant logic offers a general structure and paradigmatic lens to discover and interpret emerging market and marketing phenomena. While S-D logic resonates with today’s contemporary business environments, a logical next step to advance as a metatheory is to bring its narrative closer to business practice and evidence-based research. Midran...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of context in service innovation by developing a conceptual framework that illuminates the key elements and trends in context change. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a service ecosystem lens for understanding how elements and trends in context foster service innovation. A conc...

Service science is concerned with the question of how systems can co-create value in an optimal way. In essence, innovations aim at enabling better value co-creation; but at the same time, cause disruption and tensions in the service ecosystem by challenging prevailing practices. This chapter examines the development and diffusion of a broad scale...

Purpose In the contemporary hospitality industry, superior customer experiences are essential to gaining customer loyalty and achieving a competitive advantage. However, limited research addresses this subject. The aim of this study is to advance scholarly research on customer experience management (CEM) in the hospitality field by providing a com...

In this paper, we examine the managing of the full innovation process, from visioning to commercialization, in extensive networks. By drawing on the IMP, strategic network, and innovation network literatures, we develop a comprehensive picture of the management activities when 'mobilizing', 'orchestrating', and 'involving' actors in working towards...

Abstract book edited by Evert Gummesson, Cristina Mele and Francesco Polese ISBN 978-88-92667-57-0

Service innovation is often viewed as a process of accessing the necessary resources, (re)combining them, and converting them into new services. The current knowledge on success factors for service innovation, such as formalized new service development (NSD) processes, predominantly comes from studying large firms with a relatively stable resource...

Purpose Service networks are inherently complex as they comprise of many interrelated actors, often driven by divergent interests. This can result in imbalance, which refers to a situation where the interests of at least one actor in a network are not secured. Drawing on the “balanced centricity” perspective, the purpose of this paper is to explore...

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to broaden extant understanding of actor engagement behavior beyond its currently dominant dyadic (micro-level) focus, by examining it from multiple levels of aggregation within a service ecosystem framework. Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper draws on service-dominant logic and structuration theory...

Purpose – Management of customer participation (CP) in service production and delivery is of critical concern for service managers, as CP can result in various positive but also negative outcomes. However, an integrated understanding on how service providers can manage CP is still missing. The purpose of this paper is to gather and synthesize the e...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss how service, as an interdisciplinary area of research, can increase its potential for transdisciplinary contributions from the perspective of what signifies intra-, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research. Design/methodology/approach – The essay first discusses common perspectives on the ser...

Purpose – The purpose is to provide directions for future research on: (1) broadening the role of customers in customer experience; (2) taking a practice-based approach to customer experience; and (3) recognizing the holistic, dynamic nature of customer experience across all touch points and over time. Design/methodology/approach – The approach i...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide directions for future research on: broadening the role of customers in customer experience; taking a practice-based approach to customer experience; and recognizing the holistic, dynamic nature of customer experience across all touch points and over time. Design/methodology/approach – The approach...

With the increasing importance of new services, various models for new service development have been created in research. An analysis has shown that such models typically consist of a development process covering activities from idea generation to market launch – implicitly claiming that one single process fits to all kind of services. However, fac...

This paper examines the drivers that lead manufacturers to choose between an internal versus external resource integration approach as they transition to solution-based business. We emphasize product-based resources and examine drivers for the choice of resource integration approach through four distinct firm boundary conceptions – identity, compet...

Purpose – The collective, interactive aspects of service experience are increasingly evident in contemporary research and practice, but no integrative analysis of this phenomenon has been conducted until now. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize service experience co-creation and examines its implications for research and practice. Design...

Purpose - This paper explores how companies access resources through network relationships when developing service innovations. We identify the types of resource that companies seek from other actors, and examine the nature of relationships and resource access strategies that can be applied to access each type of resource. Design/methodology/appro...

This chapter deals with: • The variety of means and online and offline platforms that enable customers to express and share their service experiences • The ways that sharing of experiences affects the service experience and service buying • The benefits of customer experience communication for service providers and customers

This study analyses the business model development of an internationalising high-tech firm seeking rapid growth, addressing the connection between the business model and entry mode selection. The paper employs an in-depth case study of a high-tech firm that operates in the cleantech industry. We demonstrate that rapid internationalisation is possib...

Purpose Customer participation in the creation of offerings has become a key focus in marketing literature. This paper synthesizes extant research on the topic to enhance understanding of the conceptualization and value outcomes of customer participation in the creation of offerings. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on an extensive,...

Purpose Increased competition and more extensive customer needs have motivated companies to develop integrated solutions. In practice, companies struggle to co‐create effective solutions that meet customer needs. The purpose of this paper is to identify critical factors affecting the effective co‐creation of customer‐focused solutions within busine...

Purpose: This study explores how value co-creation occurs at a network level in a service system comprising representatives of business, consumer, and community actors. The research centres on the following questions: 1) what kind of operand and operant resources are contributed and integrated in the value co-creation process? 2) What value-in-use...

Purpose of the paper and literature addressed: In this study a resource perspective is taken to the study of networks. The purpose of the paper is to provide insight into the resource access through relationships for the purpose of new service development. The paper discusses the resources sought in business networks for new service development, re...

The paper describes how R&D management control devices are used differently in two service R&D projects. The paper begins with a literature review concerning service R&D management and R&D control. Empirically, we then describe a longitudinal case study at a machinery manufacturer (2003 to 2010). The empirical data set is exceptional in its depth a...

This paper studies the practices of "service productization" by analyzing the discourse used by practitioners in small professional service firms. The study makes a contribution by describing practices that managers draw upon to cope with the abstract, elusive nature of the professional service, and by discussing the relationship between the market...

The growing trends of outsourcing and specialization have led many industrial customers to centralize their purchases and seek suppliers that can provide more extensive solutions [1][1; 2; 3]. The focus in the solutions marketing literature has been inherently product-centred, and there has been a shortage of research into solutions originating in...

Purpose of the paper and literature addressed: Collaborative processes play an important role in the business marketing literature, as close interaction between buyers and sellers is a key to understanding inter-organizational exchanges. The recently emerged Service-Dominant logic also emphasises the importance of interaction and relationships in a...

While patient participation in treatment decisions is increasingly advocated in medical literature, patient demand has been considered to cause unnecessary prescribing. Using the concept of customer participation as discussed in services marketing and management literature as a theoretical base, the paper analyses the influence of patient participa...

This paper investigates the Critical innovation characteristics that influence the acceptability of a new pharmaceutical product format as perceived by medical service providers. Professional service providers act as "surrogate adopters" as they decide about the adoption of a product intended for their clients' use. We employ a qualitative research...

This article analyses purchase decision-making for products and services that are acquired and used by consumers, but chosen by professional service providers. This is done by comparing the distinct characteristics of purchase decision-making in the contexts of professional consumer services and organizational and consumer buying. Three aspects are...

Purpose To test the validity of the presumed characteristics of professional services by studying their manifestation in the problem solving that occurs in service production. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses medical research as secondary data to study the existence of associations between the presumed characteristics of professional ser...

AMA Servsig 2010 International Service Research Conference, 2010, Porto, Portugal 17 - 19 June 2010, 75 The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge of service concept development within b-to-b networks. The research strategy employed in this paper is a qualitative multiple-case study of three collaborative NSD projects. By integrating the co...

EBRF 2010 Conference - Program and Abstracts, 67 The purpose of the research is to increase knowledge on value co-creation within b-to-b networks. The research strategy employed is a qualitative multiple-case study. By integrating the conceptual discussion on value co-creation with practical experiences in two cases, we discuss the value of network...