The Service Dominant Logic of Marketing

Literature Review and Similarities with Business-to-Business Marketing

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: 1,3, Otto Beisheim School of Management Vallendar, language: English, abstract: This thesis aims at looking into the reactions and discussions regarding the proposed service-dominant logic (S-D logic) in more detail. Seven years after the initial publication in the Journal of Marketing, no comprehensive overview of the existing literature has yet been made. How did long-established scholars respond to the suggestions and findings of Vargo and Lusch? Was it rather positive or negative? What needs to be done in the future in order to actually implement a service-centered thinking? In the following chapters, I will introduce the basic ideas of S-D logic, followed by a detailed state-of-literature to capture the various publications that arose from the initial Vargo and Lusch article. The vast majority of marketing research (one could name it 'mainstream' marketing research) is concerned with consumer, or B2C, marketing. But what about business-to-business relationships? It is interesting to figure out 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. This is what I am going to examine in the last part of this thesis.