The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing

Book excerpt: Expanding on the editors' award-winning article "Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing," this book presents a challenging new paradigm for the marketing discipline. This new paradigm is service-oriented, customer-oriented, relationship-focused, and knowledge-based, and places marketing, once viewed as a support function, central to overall business strategy. Service-dominant logic defines service as the application of competencies for the benefit of another entity and sees mutual service provision, rather than the exchange of goods, as the proper subject of marketing. It moves the orientation of marketing from a "market to" philosophy where customers are promoted to, targeted, and captured, to a "market with" philosophy where the customer and supply chain partners are collaborators in the entire marketing process. The editors elaborate on this model through an historical analysis, clarification, and extension of service-dominant logic, and distinguished marketing thinkers then provide further insight and commentary. The result is a more comprehensive and inclusive marketing theory that will challenge both current thinking and marketing practice.