Customer usage processes

Abstract

For more than a decade, marketing scholars in the field of service-dominant logic have discussed the ideas of customer value and value creation. An important element in customer value creation is the resources customers use in usage processes. A thorough investigation of these processes, however, is absent in the literature. The purposes of this article are to (1) provide a conceptual understanding of customer usage processes and (2) identify the dimensions for differentiating these processes. Building on an extensive literature review, we derive a conceptualization of customer usage processes and identify three dimensions to differentiate these processes, namely, actor intensity, interaction intensity, and resource intensity. We specify these dimensions further by using the repertory grid technique. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the nature of customer usage processes, the possibilities for differentiating them, and their relationship to the value creation process.