Purpose -The paper seeks to introduce to a new perspective on the roles of customers and companies in creating value by outlining a customer-based approach to service. The customer's logic is examined in-depth as being the foundation of a customer-dominant (CD) marketing and business logic. Design/methodology/approach -The authors argue that both the goods-and service-dominant logic are provider-dominant. Contrasting the provider-dominant logic with CD logic, the paper examines the creation of service value from the perspectives of value-in-use, the customer's own context, and the customer's experience of service. Findings -Moving from a provider-dominant logic to a CD logic uncovered five major challenges to service marketers: company involvement, company control in co-creation, visibility of value creation, scope of customer experience, and character of customer experience.Research limitations/implications -The paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a new perspective and suggests implications for research and practice. Practical implications -Awareness of the mechanisms of customer logic will provide businesses with new perspectives on the role of the company in their customers' lives. It is proposed that understanding the customer's logic should represent the starting-point for the company's marketing and business logic. Originality/value -The paper increases the understanding of how the customer's logic underpins the CD business logic. By exploring consequences of applying a CD logic, further directions for theoretical and empirical research are suggested.

Purpose -Customer activity in service has mainly been understood within the boundaries of interactions with service providers. This paper goes beyond this view to focus on the customer's independent activity, of which interaction is only a part. Moreover, the concept of customer activity remains largely unexplored and undefined. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to develop the concept of customer activity and to show how it can be applied in an empirical study. Design/methodology/approach -The paper reviews the concept of customer activity in service marketing. It then goes on to characterise and operationalise the concept, and finally apply it to an explorative study. The study contrasts customer activity from the provider's interaction-centric point of view with customer activity from the customer's own point of view. Findings -This paper defines customer activities as discrete sequences of behaviour that aim at creating or supporting some types of value in the customer's life or business. A customer-dominant perspective on customer activity allows companies to understand the role of their service in the various activities of different types of customers. Originality/value -The paper contributes to service research by bringing attention to the concept of customer activity and contrasting it with alternative concepts. The paper is the first to show how customers combine different activities (where service interaction is only one type) into systems, which they maintain to create value for themselves. By profiling customers according to activity systems, providers can understand their own role in the customer's network of value-creating activities.

Purpose Previous research on advertising in digital contexts has emphasized its persuasive and information processing roles for the customer. This paper aims to problematize this point of view and argues that the converged and interactive nature of digital media makes all advertising content into potential points of engagement in a digital media journey. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual in nature and applies service logic (SL) and customer engagement to reconceptualize digital advertising and selling. Findings The authors present digital advertisements and digital media content as elements that contribute to a digital media journey, which ideally leads to a purchase. Advertising content is regarded as a resource used by consumers in their underlying value-creating processes. Thus, the digital advertising process is conceptualized as a customer-driven process of engaging with digital media content, where a purchase is incorporated in (and naturally follows from) the theme of engagement. Research limitations/implications The paper introduces the concept of contextually embedded selling, which refers to a process where digital advertising content is thematically congruent with the surrounding editorial content, so that both contribute to the same consumer journey. Otherwise, consumers experience a contextual jump – a disconnect in theme, place or time during the consumer’s process of engagement with the digital content. Originality/value The paper contributes to advertising theory on advertising, engagement and the emerging research on consumer journey design by presenting an approach based on SL, namely, contextually embedded digital selling.

Purpose The paper aims to introduce the idea that consumers have relationships with their own recurring activities. Instead of the usual notion of investigating the relationships between actors, or between actors and their possessions, the paper focuses on the relationship between an actor and a particular activity in which the actor regularly participates. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual and exploratory in nature. It discusses different perspectives of consumer activity in marketing and then introduces a relationship view of activity. The paper proceeds to outline the conceptual foundations of this view by applying relationship characteristics found in the literature. Quotes from runners’ blogs are used to illustrate the different identified relationship themes. Findings The paper argues that consumers can be seen as having long-term relationships with their activities, and it introduces the concept of the “activity relationship”. The paper proceeds to demonstrate how this concept differs from the previous conceptualization of consumer activity and relationships. Research limitations/implications The activity-relationship perspective on consumer behavior opens up new venues for marketing research. It also facilitates new types of marketing practice, whereby producers can focus on supporting their customers’ relationships with valuable activities. Originality/value The paper presents a novel perspective on relationships. It contributes to consumer research and the customer-dominant view of marketing, whereby the customer’s perspective is put in focus and businesses serve as ingredients in the customer’s own context.

PurposeThis paper aims to develop and apply a service design method that allows for stronger recognition and integration of human activities into the front-end stages of the service design process.Design/methodology/approachFollowing a discussion of different service design perspectives and activity theory, the paper develops a method called activity-set mapping (ActS). ActS is applied to an exploratory service design project to demonstrate its use.FindingsThree broad perspectives on service design are suggested: (1) the dyadic interaction, (2) the systemic interaction and (3) the customer activity perspectives. The ActS method draws on the latter perspective and focuses on the study of human activity sets. The application of ActS shows that the method can help identify and visualize sets of activities.Research limitations/implicationsThe ActS method opens new avenues for service design by zooming in on the micro level and capturing the set of activities linked to a desired goal achievement. However, the method is limited to activities reported by research participants and may exclude unconscious activities. Further research is needed to validate and refine the method.Practical implicationsThe ActS method will help service designers explore activities in which humans engage to achieve a desired goal/end state.Originality/valueThe concept of “human activity set” is new to service research and opens analytical opportunities for service design. The ActS method contributes a visualization tool for identifying activity sets and uncovering the benefits, sacrifices and frequency of activities.