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The emergence of new social media is shifting the market place for business towards virtual market space. In the light of the emerging digital space for new forms of marketing, the traditional servicescape concept is critically examined. This paper aims to show why servicescape concepts and attitudes need to be adapted for digital media.

First, the authors explain how the traditional servicescape concept adds meaning to a service provider’s value-proposition by modifying customer expectations and customer experience. Second, recognising that the environment for service is no longer bound to a physical place, the authors discuss the implications of the epistemic shift involved.

The authors’ examination shows that digital service space challenges traditional concepts about what constitutes a customer experience and derived value. The authors conceptually “zoom out” into a virtual service eco-system and show with exemplar examples why the servicescape in digital space is more socially embedded and necessarily more fluid in its time-space design. In the more advanced sites, interactions between various artificial bodies (avatars) are co-created by controlling off-line participant-actors; yet, these participant-actors remain strangers to each other at an off-line level. This is entirely a new and radical development of old times.

The research findings are based on scholarly research of the relevant literature, from practitioner reports, and evidence emerging from the examination of many digital web-sites. It has not been the authors’ intention to objectively represent current servicescape functionalities but more to indicate the major directions of change with exemplar examples. The future cannot be predicted, but their interpretive conclusions suggest major challenges in service marketing and management logic ahead. New forms of digital servicescape are still being created as technology and service imagination enables, so further research interest in virtual atmospherics can be expected.

Social media platforms are enabling organisations to learn more about their customers and also to engage them more. In these changing times, bricks and mortar stores would be well advised to review their servicescape presence to allow and encourage engagement with the more involved consumers. And, by integrating their digital space into their physical place, bricks and mortar stores might take on more relationship oriented process-like characteristics, both in the digital space and in their physical places, with developments on one platform leading to possible service innovations on the other.

The digital era is changing consumer behaviour. Service managers need to take into account that many customers are already equally as engaged with digital-space social networks as they once were with bricks and mortar stores. The more time consumers as participant-actors spend in social networks, the decision on what and where to buy is decided by interactions with friends and other influencers.

New forms of digital servicescape are being created as technology and service imagination enables. Further scholarly research interest in virtual atmospherics can be expected, impacting on the authors’ sense of place, and self-identity.

Having an ageing population is an issue facing many countries, particularly western nations. With governments and service providers focusing on healthy ageing and ageing in place, notions of choice and active participation for older people in selecting services appropriate to remaining in the community are also emphasised. Central to this is the issue of information navigation: knowing what services are available and how to get that information, for older people and those who support them. Based on a series of qualitative studies of service provision and using perspectives from older people, their families and those who provide services for them, this paper argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the process of information navigation as opposed to providing ever more information content.

Outlines, briefly, the history of the ANZ Bank in Australia and the changing nature of banking. Describes the “people oriented” issues which carried the change process forward when, with the support and encouragement of top management, the Bank began its “Customer Care” programme with an intentional focus on “trouble‐shooting”, customer service improvement and influencing changes in management‐staff relations. Asserts that if people become knowledgeable and work within the system, they can contribute to quality improvement by acting on this knowledge and participating in the changes that affect their work life.

A retail banking case study published in this journal ten years ago described a method for inviting staff involvement in customer service improvement. In this article, the author has reinterpreted the case as an archetypal example of internal marketing for generating and circulating staff knowledge through a network of voluntary internal relationships. First, a typology for making sense of conflicting concepts in the internal marketing literature is provided. Second, the author returns to the case data to suggest an integrated theoretical framework for internal marketing that links the parallel but distinctive traditions of relationship marketing and the markets‐as‐networks approach of the International Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group. Third, internal marketing is defined as a relationship development strategy for the purpose of knowledge renewal. Finally, the implications for management are examined.

This paper aims to explore how the service‐dominant (S‐D) logic of marketing proposed by Vargo and Lusch impacts on business‐to‐business branding concepts and practice.

Vargo and Lusch argue that service interaction comes from goods‐in‐use as well as from interactions between a buyer and a supplier. Their key concepts are examined and the branding literature critically compared.

Goods become service appliances. Buyer judgments about the value‐in‐use of goods extends the time‐logic of marketing. The exchange concept is no longer transaction bound. Service‐ability (the capability to serve) becomes the essence of a firm's value propositions. Service experience becomes paramount in developing and sustaining the life of a brand.

S‐D logic highlights the need for rigour and clarity in the use of the term “brand”. It also opens up for consideration a variety of previously unexplored contact points in the customer service cycle, expanded to include customer assessments of value‐in‐use.

S‐D logic encourages extending brand strategies into a wider variety of communicative interaction modes.

Some of the issues raised are not new but currently compete for attention in the shadow of media‐dominant approaches to branding.

This article explores the structural relationships through which internal marketing can create value for an organisation, its customers and its employees. It is argued that internal marketing requires a relationship‐mediated approach, where planned phases of learning activity in volunteer groups generate new internally valid knowledge critical to the improvement of external market performance. Thus internal marketing is defined as a relationship development strategy for the purpose of knowledge renewal. First, the author presents a typology of knowledge exchange patterns within organisations on which internal marketing is based. Second, a four‐phase internal marketing process grounded in case research is presented. Next, the structure of relationship development for internal marketing is described, one which mediates knowledge transfer between the individuals involved and to their organisation as a whole. Finally, the paper offers five propositional statements in support of a relationship‐mediated theory of internal marketing.

In the drive for total quality, the interdependence of staff motivation, performance measurement, and rewards will be stressed. Turning the wheel of quality improvement – continuously – involves designing a good fit for these elements within the change processes and, more, reassessing the historic role of managers in the planning, organising and controlling processes.

Relationship marketing is based on the idea that the existence of a relationship between customer and supplier creates value for both parties, in addition to the value of the products or services provided. In this special issue edition entitled “Pathways less traveled to value creation: interaction, dialogue and knowledge generation” articles are submitted from five sets of authors, giving different perspectives of marketing and the knowledge generation and communication aspects surrounding it.