A Product Service-System (PSS) is an integrated combination of products and services. This western concept embraces a service led competitive strategy, environmental sustainability, and the basis to differentiate from competitors who simply offer lower priced products. This paper aims to report the state-of-the-art of PSS research by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on this topic. The literature is classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed.On this basis, this paper defines the PSS concept, reports on its origin and features, gives examples of applications along with potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarises available tools and methodologies, and identifies future research challenges. AbstractA Product Service-System (PSS) is an integrated combination of products and services. This western concept embraces a service led competitive strategy, environmental sustainability, and the basis to differentiate from competitors who simply offer lower priced products. This paper aims to report the state-of-the-art of PSS research by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on this topic. The literature is classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed.On this basis, this paper defines the PSS concept, reports on its origin and features, gives examples of applications along with potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarises available tools and methodologies, and identifies future research challenges.

We propose a conceptual framework that reconciles the practitioners' view of engagement as central to online best practice and the scholarly view that tends to use other constructs to assess consumer experience. Building on research in e-learning as well as online marketing, we characterize the consumer experiential response to website and environmental stimuli as a dynamic, tiered perceptual spectrum which includes interactivity, telepresence and engagement. We construe engagement as a cognitive and affective commitment to an active relationship with the brand as personified by the website, and we propose dimensions of this construct. We discuss how the constructs of interactivity, flow and involvement are related to but distinct from the constructs within our conceptual framework. We offer suggestions for future empirical research into developing a scale for engagement and assessing its importance and utility.

This study proposes a conceptual model for customer experience quality and its impact on customer relationship outcomes. Customer experience is conceptualized as the customer's subjective response to the holistic direct and indirect encounter with the firm, and customer experience quality as its perceived excellence or superiority. Using the repertory grid technique in 40 interviews in B2B and B2C contexts, the authors find that customer experience quality is judged with respect to its contribution to value-in-use, and hence propose that value-in-use mediates between experience quality and relationship outcomes. Experience quality includes evaluations not just of the firm's products and services but also of peer-to-peer and complementary supplier encounters. In assessing experience quality in B2B contexts, customers place a greater emphasis on firm practices that focus on understanding and delivering value-in-use than is generally the case in B2C contexts. Implications for practitioners' customer insight processes and future research directions are suggested.

Toossi, and the anonymous practitioner informants. They also thank the three anonymous JM reviewers and associate editor for their helpful suggestions on previous versions of the manuscript.

Marketers face the challenge of resource allocation across a range of touchpoints. Hence understanding their relative impact is important, but previous research tends to examine brand advertising, retailer touchpoints, word-of-mouth, and traditional earned touchpoints separately. This article presents an approach to understanding the relative impact of multiple touchpoints. It exemplifies this approach with six touchpoint types: brand advertising, retailer advertising, in-store communications, word-of-mouth, peer observation (seeing other customers), and traditional earned media such as editorial. Using the real-time experience tracking (RET) method by which respondents report on touchpoints by contemporaneous text message, the impact of touchpoints on change in brand consideration is studied in four consumer categories: electrical goods, technology products, mobile handsets, and soft drinks. Both touchpoint frequency and touchpoint positivity, the valence of the customer's affective response to the touchpoint, are modeled. While relative touchpoint effects vary somewhat by category, a pooled model suggests the positivity of in-store communication is in general more influential than that of other touchpoints including brand advertising. An almost entirely neglected touchpoint, peer observation, is consistently significant. Overall, findings evidence the relative impact of retailers, social effects and third party endorsement in addition to brand advertising. Touchpoint positivity adds explanatory power to the prediction of change in consideration as compared with touchpoint frequency alone. This suggests the importance of methods that track touchpoint perceptual response as well as frequency, to complement current analytic approaches such as media mix modeling based on media spend or exposure alone.