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This paper highlights the suitability, application and fruitful opportunities for ethnographic methodologies in contemporary B2B service research.

This paper is based on a literature review and conceptual analysis of ethnographic research methodology and B2B service literatures.

This paper discusses the central features of ethnographic research methodologies, their key differences to other qualitative methodologies, key trends in contemporary B2B service research and opportunities for ethnographic research methodologies in selected priority areas.

This paper highlights the opportunities, unique strengths and specific advantages of ethnographic research methodologies to advance B2B service research and theory development.

This paper encourages B2B firms to undertake ethnographic field projects to better understand customers’ roles, experiences and usage processes that relate to B2B services.

Ethnographic research approaches have been largely overlooked or neglected in B2B service research. This paper highlights their potential, suggests areas for application and encourages B2B service researchers to adopt ethnographic approaches to delve deeper into the social and cultural aspects of B2B services

This study aims to explore the institutionalization of value-based healthcare (VBHC) in the public healthcare system in the state of Victoria, Australia.

The empirical part of this paper is based on a content analysis of 34 policy and industry-commissioned reports that have guided the development of health-care strategy in Victoria from 1988 to 2020.

This study sheds light on how VBHC in Victoria has been institutionalized over time, through three key phases (centralization, transitioning and digitalization), how the conceptualization of best value has changed in each phase and the implications each phase has presented for other actors in the health-care system.

This study highlights the key opportunities and challenges for organizational actors that emerge when a health-care system transitions toward VBHC, and derives implications for vendors, health-care procurement, policymakers and governmental agencies.

This study develops a longitudinal analysis that describes the evolution and institutionalization of a VBHC approach in a complex societal system over three decades and highlights the key implications for other organizational stakeholders.

This paper highlights the potential of social activism – defined as a public act that aims to challenge the status quo by bringing alternative views or narratives to the debate – in transformative service research and proposes a future research agenda.

This paper builds upon a review of social activism in the management and communications literature to identify its potential for social change in service (eco)systems.

This paper outlines three ways in which social activism can influence companies (external activism, internal activism, and activism as practice) and illustrates how they can be used to advance transformative service research in selected priority areas.

This paper develops a future research agenda and suggests research questions that could guide scholarly inquiry at the intersection of social activism and transformative service research.

For managers and policy makers, this paper highlights how social activism can influence companies' attempts to drive social change.

This paper is among the first to link social activism and transformative service research and highlight novel research opportunities at their intersection.

The purpose of this study is to explain how the application of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and experiments can advance theory development in the field of servitization by generating better causal explanations.

FsQCA and experiments are established research methods that are suited for developing causal explanations but are rarely utilized by servitization scholars. To support their application, we explain how fsQCA and experiments represent distinct ways of developing causal explanations, provide guidelines for their practical application and highlight potential application areas for a future research agenda in the servitization domain.

FsQCA enables specification of cause–effects relationships that result in equifinal paths to an intended outcome. Experiments have the highest explanatory power and enable the drawing of direct causal conclusions through reliance on an interventionist logic. Together, these methods provide complementary ways of developing and testing theory when the research objective is to understand the causal pathways that lead to observed outcomes.

Applications of fsQCA help to explain to managers why there are numerous causal routes to attaining an intended outcome from servitization. Experiments support managerial decision-making by providing definitive “yes/no” answers to key managerial questions that address clearly specified cause–effect relationships.

The main contribution of this study is to help advance theory development in servitization by encouraging greater methodological plurality in a field that relies primarily on the qualitative case study methodology.

The strategies to assess potential and realized customer value have received surprisingly little attention in management literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine potential customer value assessment strategies for business-to-business (B2B) firms and their special characteristics.

The empirical part of the study draws from an exploratory, two-part field study involving three pilot firms, and seven best practice firms in customer value assessment. The research design followed an inductive, discovery-oriented grounded theory approach. Primary data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 35 business managers from ten B2B firms.

The study identifies three customer value assessment strategies adopted by firms in business markets: Emergent value sales strategy; Life-cycle value management strategy; and Dedicated value specialist strategy. These strategies highlight different ways of managing and coordinating organizational units in different phases of the customer value assessment process.

The study was conducted from the supplier's perspective and is context-bound to firms operating in B2B markets.

Managers need to select an appropriate strategy for customer value assessment depending on market and offering characteristics, and assign clear responsibilities for value potential identification, baseline assessment, and long-term value realization.

The extant literature on customer value lacks understanding on customer value assessment strategies. The present study identifies three strategies that illuminate the required resources and organizational units at different phases of the customer value assessment process.

The purpose of this study is to review the current body of the B2B branding literature, and identify research issues that hamper current B2B branding research.

The study employs a systematic review, and identifies 73 relevant journal publications from the years 1973‐2010 that were subsequently evaluated for further analysis.

This study identifies five possible issues hampering current B2B branding research: the lack of systematic theory development, the transference of consumer concepts, the dominance of quantitative research, the lack of longitudinal research, and the focus on single industries.

This study considers only published journal articles, excluding books and conference proceedings. By highlighting the research issues, this paper aims to direct research efforts to areas where they will have the most impact, and thus aid more rapid advancement of B2B branding as a discipline.

This study provides the first systematic review to identify and evaluate the current B2B branding literature. The review identifies the key literature related to B2B branding, provides an overview of past research and identifies emerging research issues to be addressed in future research.

Despite increasing interest in customer solutions, and the importance of brand management in the B2B context, prior research provides little understanding on brand positioning strategies adopted by solution providers. The present study aims to examine the possible brand positioning strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions.

The empirical part of the present study consists of a multiple case study, involving four industrial firms providing customer solutions. Primary data was gathered by semi-structured interviews from a total of 22 business managers from the case companies.

The present study identifies four possible brand position strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions: customer value diagnostic, global solution integrator, high quality sub-systems provider, and long-term service partner. The identified strategies highlight the tendency of solution suppliers to position their brands around different capabilities that are needed at different phases of the solution delivery process.

The present study was conducted from the industrial supplier's perspective and is context-bound to companies operating in solution-oriented process and information technology industries.

Managers need to identify the capabilities that are central to delivering customer value and acquire and/or develop capability configurations that differentiate their brand positioning from competitors.

Existing literature on branding lacks understanding about the specific characteristics of building brands in solution-oriented B2B contexts. The present study identifies four brand positioning strategies that illuminate the special characteristics of branding customer solutions.

The business-to-business (B2B) marketing literature is heavily focused on the manufacturing sector. However, it is the B2B service sector that shows the highest growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Beyond a vibrant stream of literature on servitization, the B2B literature has neglected drawing on the wider service literature. This paper aims to examine recent streams of service research that have promising implications and research opportunities for B2B marketing.

Together, the author team has decades of research, managerial and executive teaching experience related to B2B marketing and services marketing and management. The observations and reflections in this paper originate from this unique perspective and are supplemented by insights from 16 expert interviews.

The authors identify and discuss in this paper four broad and related themes from the service literature that can stimulate B2B research and practice. First, the authors highlight the implications for capturing value in economies with their rapidly increasing specialization and related growth in B2B services. Specifically, the authors explain where B2B firms should focus on to gain bargaining power in the value chains of the future. Second, an additional strategy to enhance a B2B firm’s power to capture value is servitization, which allows firms to get closer to their customers, increase their switching costs and build strategic partnerships. The authors explore how firms can use service productization to enhance their chances of successful servitization. Third, servitization is expensive, and productivity and scalability are often a challenge in B2B contexts. These issues are tackled in a recent service research stream on cost-effective service excellence (CESE) where the authors derive implications for B2B firms. Fourth and related to CESE, latest developments in intelligent automation offer exciting opportunities for B2B services to be made more scalable.

This paper is based on the unique perspective of the author team and a panel of experts and connects major streams of service research to the B2B literature.