Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing by Vargo, S.L. & Lusch, R.F (2017).

Résumé :

Marketing inherited a model of exchange from economics, which had a dominant logic based on the exchange of “goods,” which usually are manufactured output. The dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions. Over the past several decades, new perspectives have emerged that have a revised logic focused on intangible resources, the cocreation of value, and relationships. The authors believe that the new perspectives are converging to form a new dominant logic for marketing, one in which service provision rather than goods is fundamental to economic exchange. The authors explore this evolving logic and the corresponding shift in perspective for marketing scholars, marketing practitioners, and marketing educators.

  • Le marketing a hérité d’un modèle d’échange de l’économie, qui avait une logique dominante basée sur l’échange de « marchandises », qui sont généralement des productions manufacturières. La logique dominante portait sur les ressources matérielles, la valeur incorporée et les transactions. Au cours des dernières décennies, de nouvelles perspectives ont émergé qui ont une logique révisée, axée sur les ressources intangibles, la cocréation de valeur et les relations. Les auteurs estiment que les nouvelles perspectives convergent pour former une nouvelle logique dominante pour la commercialisation, l’une dans laquelle la prestation de services, plutôt que les marchandises, est fondamentale pour l’échange économique. Les auteurs explorent cette logique évolutive et le changement de perspective correspondant pour les spécialistes du marketing, les praticiens du marketing et les éducateurs en marketing.

Mots clefs :

Services marketing; goods marketing ; marketing institutions ; Customer satisfaction

Développement :

The formal study of marketing focused at first on the distribution and exchange of commodities and manufactured products and featured a foundation in economics (Marshall 1927; Shaw 1912; Smith 1904). The first marketing scholars directed their attention toward commodities exchange (Copeland 1923), the marketing institutions that made goods available and arranged for possession (Nystrom 1915; Weld 1916), and the functions that needed to be performed to facilitate the exchange of goods through marketing institutions (Cherington 1920; Weld 1917).

By the early 1950s, the functional school began to morph into the marketing management school, which was characterized by a decision-making approach to managing the marketing functions and an overarching focus on the customer (Drucker 1954; Levitt 1960; McKitterick 1957). McCarthy (1960) and Kotler (1967) characterized marketing as a decision-making activity directed at satisfying the customer at a profit by targeting a market and then making optimal decisions on the marketing mix, or the “4 P’s.”

Gummesson (1995, pp. 250–51, emphasis added) states the following: Customers do not buy goods or services: [T]hey buy offerings which render services which create value.… The traditional division between goods and services is long outdated. It is not a matter of redefining services and seeing them from a customer perspective; activities render services, things render services. The shift in focus to services is a shift from the means and the producer perspective to the utilization and the customer perspective.

(Un résumé de cette évolution au cours des 100 dernières années est présenté dans le tableau 1 et la figure 1)

Briefly, marketing has moved from a goods-dominant view, in which tangible output and discrete transactions were central, to a service-dominant view, in which intangibility, exchange processes, and relationships are central.

It is worthwhile to note that the service-centered view should not be equated with (1) the restricted, traditional conceptualizations that often treat services as a residual (that which is not a tangible good; e.g., Rathmell 1966); (2) something offered to enhance a good (value-added services); or (3) what have become classified as services industries, such as health care, government, and education. Rather, we define services as the application of specialized competences (knowledge and skills) through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity itself.

1950–1980: Marketing Management •Business should be customer focused (Drucker 1954; McKitterick 1957) •Value “determined” in marketplace (Levitt 1960) •Marketing is a decision-making and problem-solving function (Kotler 1967; McCarthy 1960) : Customers do not buy things but need or want fulfillment. Everyone in the firm must be focused on the customer because the firm’s only purpose is to create a satisfied customer. Identification of the functional responses to the changing environment that provide competitive advantage through differentiation begins to shift toward value in use.

The marketing literature rarely mentioned “immaterial products” or “services,” and when it did, it mentioned them only as “aids to the production and marketing of goods” (Converse 1921, p. vi; see Fisk, Brown, and Bitner 1993).

On remarque que pendant des années, le marketing des services n’était pas reconnu en tant que tel mais était seulement reconnu comme une aide apportée au marketing de biens autrement dit une prestation qui pousserait à l’achat de biens tangibles.

The service-centered view can be stated as follows: 1. Identify or develop core competences, the fundamental knowledge and skills of an economic entity that represent potential competitive advantage. 2. Identify other entities (potential customers) that could benefit from these competences. 3. Cultivate relationships that involve the customers in developing customized, competitively compelling value propositions to meet specific needs. 4. Gauge marketplace feedback by analyzing financial performance from exchange to learn how to improve the firm’s offering to customers and improve firm performance.

The service-centered view of marketing is customercentric (Sheth, Sisodia, and Sharma 2000) and market driven (Day 1999). This means more than simply being consumer oriented; it means collaborating with and learning from customers and being adaptive to their individual and dynamic needs. A service-centered dominant logic implies that value is defined by and cocreated with the consumer rather than embedded in output.

C’est dans cette optique que la notion d’expérience client et de satisfaction client prend tout son sens et découle de l’apprentissage des besoins clients. Le consommateur est un acteur principal dans le marketing des services.

Haeckel (1999) observes successful firms moving from practicing a “make-and-sell” strategy to a “sense-and-respond” strategy. Day (1999, p. 70) argues for thinking in terms of self-reinforcing “value cycles” rather than linear value chains. In the servicecentered view of marketing, firms are in a process of continual hypothesis generation and testing. Outcomes (e.g., financial) are not something to be maximized but something to learn from as firms try to serve customers better and improve their performance.

Six differences between the goods- and service-centered dominant logic, all centered on the distinction between operand and operant resources, are presented in Table 2. The six attributes and our eight foundational premises (FPs) help present the patchwork of the emerging dominant logic.

Frederic Bastiat criticized the political economists’view that value was tied only to tangible objects. For Bastiat (1860, p. 40), the foundations of economics were people who have “wants” and who seek “satisfactions.” Although a want and its satisfaction are specific to each person, the effort required is often provided by others. For Bastiat (1964, pp. 161–62), “the great economic law is this: Services are exchanged for services…. It is trivial, very commonplace; it is, nonetheless, the beginning, the middle, and the end of economic science.” He argued (1860, p. 43) the following: “[I]t is in fact to this faculty … to work the one for the other; it is this transmission of efforts, this exchange of services [this emphasis added], with all the infinite and involved combinations to which it gives rise … which constitutes Economic Science, points out its origin, and determines its limits.” Therefore, value was considered the comparative appreciation of reciprocal skills or services that are exchanged to obtain utility; value meant “value in use.”

Norris (1941, p. 136) was one of the first scholars to recognize that people want goods because they provide services.

Par exemple, on ne souhaite pas une ampoule connectée / intelligente dans notre chambre d’hôtel juste pour éclairer la pièce mais pour créer une ambiance, qui plus est, qui nous ressemble. Cette ampoule nous permet donc de personnaliser l’ambiance de notre chambre selon notre humeur ou nos envies et apporte un réel service, bien plus que de la lumière.

In addition to their direct service provision, the appliances serve as platforms for meeting higher-order needs (Rifkin 2000). Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000, p. 84) refer to the appliances as “artifacts, around which customers have experiences” (see also Pine and Gilmore 1999). Gutman (1982, p. 60) has pointed out that products are “means” for reaching “end-states,” or “valued states of being, such as happiness, security, and accomplishment.”

From a service-centered view of marketing with a heavy focus on continuous processes, the consumer is always involved in the production of value. Even with tangible goods, production does not end with the manufacturing process; production is an intermediary process.

Le produit fournit un service mais il faut aussi que le client apprenne à l’utiliser pour pouvoir « profiter » de ce service, sinon il n’y a pas de bénéfices avec ce produit.

Likewise, Gronroos (2000, pp. 24–25; emphasis in original) states, Value for customers is created throughout the relationship by the customer, partly in interactions between the customer and the supplier or service provider. The focus is not on products but on the customers’ value-creating processes where value emerges for customers and is perceived by them.

Interactivity, integration, customization, and coproduction are the hallmarks of a service-centered view and its inherent focus on the customer and the relationship.

Bibliographie :

Bastiat, Fredric (1860), Harmonies of Political Economy, Patrick S. Sterling, trans. London: J. Murray. ——— (1964), Selected Essays on Political Economy, (1848), Seymour Cain, trans., George. B. de Huszar, ed. Reprint, Princeton, NJ : D. Van Nordstrand.

Cherington, Paul T. (1920), The Elements of Marketing. New York: Macmillan

Converse, Paul D. (1921), Marketing Methods and Politics. New York: Prentice Hall.

Copeland, Melvin T. (1923), Marketing Problems. New York: A.W. Shaw

Day, George (1999), The Market Driven Organization: Understanding, Attracting, and Keeping Valuable Customers. New York: The Free Press.

Drucker, Peter F. (1954), The Practice of Management. New York: Harper and Row.

Fisk, Raymond P., Stephen W. Brown, and Mary Jo Bitner (1993), “Tracking the Evolution of the Services Marketing Literature,” Journal of Retailing, 69 (Spring), 61–103.

Gronroos, Christian (2000), Service Management and Marketing: A Customer Relationship Management Approach. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Gummesson, Evert (1995), “Relationship Marketing: Its Role in the Service Economy,” in Understanding Services Management, William J. Glynn and James G. Barnes, eds. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 244–68.

Gutman, Jonathan (1982) “A Means–End Chain Model Based on Consumer Categorization Processes,” Journal of Marketing, 46 (Spring), 60–72.

Haeckel, Stephen H. (1999), Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations. Boston: Harvard School of Business.

Kotler, Philip (1967), Marketing Management Analysis, Planning, and Control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Levitt, Theodore (1960), “Marketing Myopia,” Harvard Business Review, 38 (July–August), 26–44, 173–81.

Marshall, Alfred (1927), Principles of Economics, (1890). Reprint, London: Macmillan.

McCarthy, E. Jerome (1960), Basic Marketing, A Managerial Approach. Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin.

McKitterick, J.B. (1957), “What Is the Marketing Management Concept?” in Frontiers of Marketing Thought and Science, Frank M. Bass, ed. Chicago: American Marketing Association, 71–81.

Norris, Ruby Turner (1941), The Theory of Consumer’s Demand. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Nystrom, Paul (1915), The Economics of Retailing, Vols. 1 and 2. New York: Ronald Press.

Pine, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore (1999), The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press

Prahalad, C.K. and and Venkatram Ramaswamy (2000), “Co-opting Customer Competence,” Harvard Business Review, 78 (January– February), 79–87.

Rathmell, John M. (1966), “What Is Meant by Services?” Journal of Marketing, 30 (October), 32–36.

Rifkin, Jeremy (2000), The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience. New York: Putnam.

Shaw, A. (1912), “Some Problems in Market Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 12 (August), 703–765.

Sheth, Jagdish, Rajendra S. Sisodia, and Arun Sharma (2000), “The Antecedents and Consequences of Customer-Centric Marketing,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 28 (Winter), 55–66.

Smith, A. (1904), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (1776). Reprint, London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell.

Weld, Louis D.H. (1916), The Marketing of Farm Products. New York: Macmillan.

  • (1917), “Marketing Functions and Mercantile Organizations,” American Economic Review, 7 (June), 306–318.