Suvi Nenonen

• Ph.D. (Econ.)
• Professor (Associate) at University of Auckland

Firms regularly seek to exert influence over their operating environments through market-shaping strategies. Such market-shaping strategies view markets as endogenously enacted environments and thus broaden firms' strategic repertoire from merely adapting to the changes in the operating environment to also proactively seeking to induce changes in r...

Coopetition—consisting of concurrent cooperation and competition—mainly focuses on business activities far from the customer, such as research and development. However, coopetition close to the customer, comprised of marketing and sales, remains an under-researched area. Applying grounded theory, we investigate how hotels and platforms (e.g., Exped...

Coopetition—a blend of cooperation and competition—is vital for ensuring hotels work successfully with platforms. Platforms are digital hubs that enable vast numbers of hotels and customers to engage with one another. However, existing research offers limited insight into how hotels balance cooperation and competition when dealing with platforms. U...

Forward-looking firms are increasingly viewing markets as malleable and plastic systems that can be influenced. Hence, they are engaging in market-shaping to proactively augment existing business opportunities or to create new ones. One of the recurring themes in the emerging market-shaping literature is the importance of value propositions. Conseq...

Purpose The extant service ecosystem literature rarely addresses the dark side of actors’ agency, which hinders further development of the service-dominant (S-D) logic, particularly with regard to understanding service ecosystem dynamics. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to delineate the dark-side facets of actors’ agency that adversely aff...

Purpose: Service-dominant logic acknowledges that actors can influence how service ecosystems evolve through institutional work, but empirical research is only nascent. This paper advances understanding of ecosystem change by proposing that dynamic capabilities are a special type of operant resources enabling actors to conduct institutional work. C...

We define market work as purposeful efforts by a focal actor to perform and transform markets and focus on the connection between market work and market change. To enable an evaluation of the effectiveness of market work, we delineate the domain of market change and provide an operational definition of its elements and develop a composite index of...

The study adopts a constructionist approach to markets, positing that markets are socially constructed human artifacts resulting from the actions and cognitive framing of the involved actors. The present research had three objectives: to develop a conceptual framework for categorizing managerial market definitions, to investigate empirically how pr...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to refine an agenda concerning the theory–praxis gap to develop a foundation for a research tradition. Design/methodology/approach The paper synthesizes and builds on the suggestions in commentary articles by Kohli (2017), Leeflang (2017) and Möller (2017). Findings The authors develop a research agenda consis...

There are heightened concerns that the theory-praxis gap is widening despite decades of academic literature addressing the issue. We propose that one viable solution to this challenge is involving practitioners in research processes as active, reflective and empowered participants. Most extant discussions addressing the inclusion of manager is part...

Customer relationships can be conceptualized as market-based assets. Links have been shown between management of these assets and the creation of shareholder value. However, the business-to-business applications of customer asset management seem to lag behind the applications suggested in a business-to-consumer context. This occurrence is possibly...

Co-creation offers firms and their network of actors significant opportunities for innovation, as each actor offers access to new resources through a process of resource integration. However, despite the significant advantages that co-creation can offer, there is surprisingly little research providing a strategic approach for identifying the most a...

Several researchers have pointed out that if marketing is to develop as a discipline and contribute to solving complex business and societal challenges, it should question the neoclassical view of markets and develop its own theory of markets. Efforts in this direction indicate an emerging view of markets as dynamic, subjective, and subject to mult...

Purpose – The last two decades have seen a surge of interest in the concept of value in business markets. Furthermore, extant literature suggests that value capture can be conceptualized as the return on the firm's customer assets. However, the existing customer asset management literature has a strong bias towards consumer markets. Thus, the purpo...

Several researchers have pointed out that if marketing is to develop as a discipline and contribute to solving complex business and societal challenges, it should question the neoclassical view of markets and develop its own theory of markets. Efforts in this direction indicate an emerging view of markets as dynamic, subjective, and subject to mult...

Using a business model perspective, we identify four continua that are of specific relevance for industrial firms transforming toward solution business models: customer embeddedness, offering integratedness, operational adaptiveness, and organizational networkedness. Using these continua, we explore the opportunities and challenges related to solut...

What do marketing scholars need to know about markets? The quote above places markets at the heart of marketing theory. Yet many commentators have lamented the scant attention paid to markets in marketing and argued for the need to better understand this central facet of the subject (Araujo et al., 2008; Vargo, 2007; Venkatesh et al., 2006). We sha...

Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to investigate how a focal market actor may design or redesign business models for improved value co-creation. Findings – We posit that value is co-created in use as actors integrate resources in practices, which makes practices a fundamental unit of value creation. Greater density of resources, relevant to a sp...

Purpose: The authors argue that (1) marketing strategy should focus more on where to compete (rather than on how to compete); (2) making subjective market definitions or market innovations may be the key to growth; and (3) a starting point for business marketers wishing to outgrow their competitors is to increase the granularity of market definitio...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of a general theory of the market, by defining markets as configurations and exploring: how market configurations emerge and evolve in a business-to-business context; how a market actor can influence market configurations; and what kinds of market configuration capabilities act...

There is a keen interest in marketing to move away from the neo-classical market definition suggesting that markets are places where demand and supply meet to reach equilibrium. In the present study, markets are defined as configurations of interdependent elements (market actor's mental models, market actor's business models, market practices) that...

Purpose A common thread in the modern marketing theories, such as service‐dominant logic and viable systems approach, is the notion value co‐creation: the locus of value creation is no longer perceived to reside within firm boundaries but value is considered to be co‐created among various actors within the networked market. The evolution of value c...

Purpose – Although there is substantial practitioner evidence for changes in the role and functioning of sales in the twenty‐first century, there is little academic research charting new directions for the sales function in a business‐to‐business context. This paper aims to report on four case studies that illustrate how sales is changing. Design/...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how, taking customer relationships as the unit of analysis, the heterogeneity of customer relationship performance influences the heterogeneity of firm performance, and how firms can balance the heterogeneity of customers, customer relationships, and customer portfolios by differentiated business mo...

Suvi Nenonen Customer asset management in action: using customer portfolios for allocating resources across business-to-business relationships for improved shareholder value Customers are crucial assets to all firms as customers are the ultimate source of all cash flows. Regardless this financial importance of customer relationships, for decades th...