Service-dominant Logic

Vargo and Lusch’s (2004a) Journal of Marketing paper, “Evolving to a new dominant logic of marketing,” has had a profound influence upon the discourse of academic marketing. At the time of writing, it has gathered over 24,580 citations indexed by Google Scholar, putting it far ahead of any other paper published in the discipline’s foremost organ of dissemination. It has become a “default reference” ( Tregua et al., 2021 , p. 585) and “a candidate for the mainstream, central focus of the marketing discipline” ( Hunt et al., 2022 , p. 151). In this chapter, I examine the way that Service-Dominant (S-D) logic has evolved and explore the dynamic between the perspective’s authors and its critics. In doing so, I position Vargo and Lusch’s (hereafter V&L) formulations of their self-described “pre-theoretic” perspective ( Lusch & Vargo, 2011 , p. 1299; Vargo, 2011 , p. 218) as outstanding examples of rhetorical and persuasive narrative technique perfectly pitched for a discipline beset by self-doubt and accusations of irrelevance. I will argue that the quite substantial transformation that S-D logic has undergone since its introduction is a function of a complex rhetorical approach to dealing with oppositional readings. Consequently, this chapter investigates the way in which academic marketing knowledge is itself marketed through a detailed account of the journey of the ideas contained in the foundational Vargo and Lusch (2004a) paper. Brownlie and Saren (1995) have called for a greater appreciation of the ways in which academic marketing is losing out to other “competing voices” (p. 623) in the provision of (usually re-purposed or re-hashed) marketing knowledge. They note that the “final authority” of the marketing scholar has been eroded away, and we find ourselves instead in a busy marketplace having to compete with a host of other knowledge brokers and using “the new armoury of persuasion technologies” ( Brownlie & Saren, 1995 ). The story of S-D logic can be seen as an instance of marketing scholarship’s internal reaction to this erosion of authority, an attempt to generate an authoritative discourse that might bind marketing academics together in a united perspective that offers insights not just into problems in contemporary marketing but also into wider issues affecting society and so offer a competitive package in the wider market for marketing knowledge. That this is largely accomplished with the well-established “persuasion technologies” of rhetoric is indicative of just how fundamental such discourse strategies remain to the contemporary generation of authority in the knowledge marketplace.