Design of tool for sensitizing managers to alternative ways of creating value from a marketing perspective

Résumé 0

Value is a central concept in both managerial practice and marketing research. Yet, it is one of the most ill-defined concepts such that it currently remains poorly understood by many managers. Value is divided into two main streams of research: Value creation processes (i.e. created value via actions) and value outcome determination (i.e. perceived value via mental processes), while customer experience can serve as a link between both. At the turn of the 21st century, many new marketing perspectives (i.e. schools of marketing thought) with their own paradigm have emerged, thereby reflecting the changes in business practices and the diversity of marketing as a managerial discipline. One of the most essential purposes of management is to apply perspective to the company’s business, whereby managers use a specific reasoning for solving problems and conduct business in a specific way for reaching their goals. Thus, a dominant logic emerges in companies that both enables and frames the way managers think and act as a result of focusing their attention on specific aspects of their business. However, many managers are not necessarily aware of the set of assumptions that they rely upon for creating value, and they also do not necessarily realize that companies and customers follow their own logic. From an Institutional Logics Perspective, marketing perspectives can be considered as competing institutional logics that can be analyzed at both the individual and organizational level such as for example determining if a manager’s conception of value creation is convergent with his/her company’s value creation process in terms of marketing perspective. Design Science proposes a methodology that can help to design a tool for sensitizing managers to alternative ways of creating value depending on the adopted marketing perspective, thereby enabling them to reflect upon the managerial implications of each marketing perspective.