A New Paradigm in Marketing – The Service Dominant Logic: Academia’s Reactions to the Theory of Vargo and Lusch

Book excerpt: For virtually all of the 20th century, the paradigm in marketing was founded on early economic thoughts, making goods and exchanges the focal point of economic research and practice. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars called for a paradigm shift, but did not deliver clear directives on how to move forward. It was not before 2004 when Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch published their award-winning article Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing in the Journal of Marketing, dealing with a potentially new paradigm for marketing. The publication has caused a lot of discussions, crowned by a collection of essays from more than 50 scholars in 2006. This book aims at looking into the reactions and discussions regarding the proposed service-dominant logic in more detail. So far, no comprehensive overview of the existing literature has yet been made. This book will introduce the basic ideas of the service-dominant logic, followed by a detailed state-of-literature. The last part of the book will examine whether the concepts of a service-dominant logic display similarities with concepts of B2B marketing and whether they could successfully be adopted in B2B markets.