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The purpose of this paper is to record the author’s personal reflections on his career as a marketing scholar.

Personal reflections in an autobiographical approach.

The author’s career as student, teacher and scholar is described in some detail.

The paper records events and memories that might otherwise be forgotten. No other such account has been published of Christian Grönroos’s career.

This conceptual paper aims at developing a customer-centric marketing communications approach that takes the starting point in the customer ecosystem.

After a critical analysis of existing marketing communications and integrated marketing communication (IMC) approaches, a customer-driven view of marketing communications is developed using recent developments in relationship communication, customer-dominant logic and the notion of customer value formation as value-in-use.

A customer-integrated marketing communication (CIMC) approach centred on a communication-in-use concept is conceptually developed and introduced. The analysis results in a CIMC model, where a customer in his or her individual ecosystem, based on integration of a set of messages from different sources, makes sense of the many messages he or she is exposed to.

The paper presents a customer-driven perspective on marketing communication and IMC. The analysis is conceptual and should trigger future empirical grounding. It indicates the need for a change in mindset in research.

CIMC requires a turnaround in the mindset that steers how companies and their marketers communicate with customers. The CIMC model provides guidelines for planning marketing communication.

The customer-driven communication-in-use concept and the CIMC model challenge traditional inside-out approaches to planning and implementing marketing communication.

This paper aims to emphasize two key research priorities central to the domain of service marketing.

Reflections based on conceptual analysis of the current level of knowledge of service as an offering and of the nature of service marketing in the literature.

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 restore its credibility, marketing needs to be reinvented. Furthermore, the point is made that if a proper understanding of service as an object of, for example, innovation, design, branding and development is lacking, or even only implicitly present, valid research into those and other important topics is at risk.

This paper discusses two neglected topics within the domain of service research. Other important areas of future research are not covered. However, the paper offers directions for service marketing research fundamental to the development of the discipline.

In earlier discussions of service and service marketing research priorities, the observation that service and marketing are neglected topics that need to be studied and further developed has not been made. The paper emphasizes that service marketing research also needs to return to its roots and suggests possible directions for future research.

This paper aims to develop an alternative perspective on marketing informed by service scholarship to resolve marketing’s challenges as a discipline and practice.

This paper is conceptual and builds on the ongoing debate regarding marketing’s challenges and on service research to develop a new alternative marketing perspective and model, which could contribute to reforming marketing.

An analysis of the current understanding of marketing showed that the discipline’s myopic focus on activities, which disregards what marketing is as a phenomenon, is the primary reason for the prevailing problems and failure to reform marketing. Based on research into service logic (SL), the paper demonstrates that a higher level view of service can be characterized as the provision of help to the users of goods and services to ensure that these goods and services deliver meaningful assistance in their lives and work. This suggests that the ultimate objective for marketing is to make firms meaningful to the users of their goods and services.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, since this paper is the first to conceptually develop a perspective on marketing and a corresponding model informed by service scholarship, more conceptual and empirical research is necessary. Developing the new meaningfulness-based perspective and model for marketing brings a new approach to the process of resolving marketing’s current troubled situation.

The meaningfulness approach to marketing enables customer-centered marketing strategies to be implemented. Such strategies include both demand-stimulating and demand-satisfying programs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to examine marketing’s troubled situation from a service research and SL perspective.

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.

Bowen and Fisk specified three criteria by which to identify a pioneering founder. In total, 11 founders met the criteria (Bateson, Berry, Bitner, Brown, Chase, Edvardsson, Grönroos, Gummesson, Parasuraman, Schneider and Zeithaml) and were invited to join Bowen and Fisk – founders that also met the criteria as coauthors. Ten founders then answered a set of questions regarding their careers as service scholars and the state of the field.

Insightful reflections were provided by each of the ten pioneering founders. In addition, based on their synthesis of the reflections, Bowen and Fisk developed nine wisdom themes for service researchers to consider and to possibly act upon.

The service research field is in its fifth decade. This article offers a unique way to learn directly from the pioneering founders about the still-relevant history of the field, the founders' lives and contributions as service scholars and the founders' hopes and concerns for the service research field.

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 the inter-functional interaction context.

Quantitative data were collected using survey approach from 129 managers from 51 departments of 22 manufacturing firms performing roles in several areas, such as procurement, logistics, sales, marketing and production. This study uses a PLS-SEM to analyze the model measurement, through confirmatory factor analysis.

The empirical data supported the proposition of this study that the VCC degree (i.e. value co-production/value in use) between functions of the firm has significant positive effects on the performance of the supply chain, in customer service and flexibility.

This study could be exceedingly useful for practitioners suggesting them to improve inter-functional integration by adopting VCC practices grounded on “value co-production” and “value in use.” Such practices may help to maximize supply chain performance.

The coordination theory was useful to deepen the analysis of its quadrant named “participatory design,” considering the relationship between VCC and inter-functional integration. This paper extended the knowledge about the relationship between the participatory design quadrant and the quadrant referring to organizational structures and processes.

This paper aims to develop the foundation of a model for assessing relationship marketing readiness (RMR) and provide directions for such an assessment.

Based on the promise theory and service logic, the importance of the customer–firm touchpoints and interactions to relationship marketing as an equivalent to the product variable in a conventional marketing approach is discussed. Then, a relationship marketing model and an RMR assessment model are developed.

The paper suggests an RMR assessment model based on two variables, namely, whether management’s focus is on the customers’ or the firm’s resources and processes and whether it is on the customers’ or the firm’s definition of quality. An indicative list of measurement factors is proposed.

The paper emphasizes the need to broaden the scope of marketing and offers a novel measurement approach, which both in theory and practice helps the development of relationship marketing understanding.

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, defined as the process of identifying and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a business model based on SL.

This article is conceptual and extends servitization in the direction of service-centric business model innovation by drawing on and extending SL.

The article defines service as a higher-order concept according to SL and develops the concept of a helping strategy as the foundation for a service-based business model. Further, it develops a typology of organizational resources and processes that must be developed for the emergence of such a business model.

Since this article is the first to conceptually develop servification, more both theoretical and empirical research is naturally required. The development of servification takes servitization in the direction of service-based business model innovation and also contributes to the research on SL.

Servification enables the development of service-centric strategies and organizational resources and processes and service-based business models.

This article is the first to adopt SL in studies of business model innovation.

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 service customers' point of view.

To capture and analyze customers' experiences of value-in-use in the typical service context of retail banking, this study employed a narrative-based critical incident technique (CIT) and a graphical tool called the value chart.

The study identified seven empirical dimensions of positive and negative value-in-use: solution, attitude, convenience, expertise, speed of service, flexibility and monetary costs. Interestingly, these value-in-use dimensions overlap considerably with previously identified dimensions of service quality.

The concepts of service quality and value-in-use in service contexts seem to represent the same empirical phenomenon despite their different theoretical traditions. Measuring customer-perceived service quality might therefore be a good proxy for assessing value-in-use in service contexts.

As the findings indicate that service quality is the way in which service customers experience value-in-use, service managers are recommended to focus on continuous quality management to facilitate the creation of value-in-use.

This study is the first to explicitly raise the notion that in the minds of service customers, value defined as value-in-use and service quality may represent the same empirical phenomenon.

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.

Research directions spurred by the publication of the original article are examined in the light of current service(s) marketing theory and practice and the development of digitalization and Internet and mobile technologies. Promising current and future strands of research are identified.

The originally suggested modes of internationalization seem to remain valid. However, digitalization and the development of Internet and mobile technologies have enabled new ways of internationalizing which enable offering services globally from the establishment of a firm.

The original article was highly rated, generated discussion and drove important further research. It has value in the history of service(s) marketing research. This retrospective analysis by the author gives unique insight into the processes and thinking associated with understanding key factors which have contributed to the historical development of service(s) marketing and provides substantial directions for future research.