Service Marketing Phenomena in the Context of Private Forest Owners—a Service Dominant Logic Perspective on Scholarly Literature

Abstract

This paper seeks to make an inquiry into the state-of-the art scholarly research of service marketing phenomena in the context of non-industrial private forest owners (NIPF). Its aim is to find out how service marketing issues have been approached in scholarly papers and what kinds of separate research approaches exist towards service marketing challenges. The core purpose of this paper is to use the most recent literature from (service) marketing to evaluate the scholarly research existing in forestry that discusses service marketing and related phenomena. In forestry, lot of scholarly research has centered on constructing different types of NIPF typologies. While the aim in some papers has been to either serve as tools for policy making or forest management planning, others have delved deeper into trying to understand NIPF communication, values, objectives, etc. Simultaneously, there has been a radical new development in (service-) marketing theory on how to rethink economic exchange. The core of this service dominant logic (SDL) is that we should move from seeing economic exchange as an exchange of products or product-like services. Instead, we should ask what core “service” this exchange provides for the different exchange parties—i.e., what (strategic) benefits the engagement provides to the actors involved in the exchange relationship. While the two might at first seem disconnected, this paper aims to show that the SDL view could be very useful in explaining the future of the services aimed at NIPF. The new view could be used to explain why some NIPF groups are not reached by traditional service marketing tools. Further, it can also provide light into what type of new service businesses might be needed for the future NIPF service sector. This paper constructs a theoretical continuum from a product-centric view of services to the abstract service dominant logic (SDL) view of services. This continuum provides light into the value creation potential of the sector but also possible value creators—i.e., new businesses and economic activities. Results suggest that while new services can be gauged by the developed theoretical view, and while NIPF value creation is a part of some disciplinary explanations of NIPF behavior, the literature is still quite product dominant in its ways to view NIPF behavior.