Revisiting the Past to Understand the Current Debates on Service-Dominant Logic

Abstract

We present a systematic review of the literature on services marketing. In doing so, we trace how the domain’s core characteristics have changed over the years, with technology playing a disruptive role. The IHIP (intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability) framework once distinguished services marketing as a sub-discipline of marketing. However, with the advent of the concept of service-dominant logic, ‘services’ within the marketing domain are no more seen as a special case but as the core of what consumers need. The article examines the key theoretical issues surrounding the shift in services marketing and concludes by providing future directions.