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Reference

Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.1.1.24036

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🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and to our episode series Weekend Classics.

I have this small, recurring feeling whenever I revisit a genuinely field-shifting paper. It is not the thrill of novelty. It is something quieter. It is the sensation that a discipline has been walking around with one set of assumptions in its pocket for years, rubbing them like old coins, and then one day someone says, gently, you know those coins are not the currency anymore.

Today’s classic is “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing” by Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch, published in the Journal of Marketing (FT50) in Volume 68, Issue 1, January 2004. It is one of those papers that does not just add to the conversation. It changes what we think the conversation is about. ✨📄

For a long time, marketing inherited an economic commonsense: goods move, money follows, value sits inside the product like a prize sealed in plastic. A transaction happens. The story ends. But Vargo and Lusch come in with a different kind of premise, almost like they are turning the object in your hand and asking you to notice what you have been ignoring.

They argue that what we really exchange is not “stuff” but service. Not service as in customer care scripts and hold music, but service as in applied skills, specialized knowledge, competence in motion. 🧠🔧 In their framing, the physical product is often just a delivery vehicle, a container for capability, a way to transport service into someone else’s life.

And then there is the sentence hiding inside the theory that, once you feel it, you cannot unfeel it: value is not embedded. Value is cocreated. 🤝🌍 It shows up in use, in context, in relationship, in the ongoing back-and-forth between firms and customers, between promises and experiences, between what is offered and what is actually lived.

So this weekend, I want to sit with the implications. For scholars, practitioners, educators, and honestly for anyone who has ever tried to explain why people do not buy what companies think they are selling. 🎧📚

Before we begin, subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, and also on YouTube at Weekend Researcher 🔔🎬. You can also find this show on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast 📲🎵.

And with gratitude, thanks to the authors Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch, and thanks to SAGE Publications and the Journal of Marketing for publishing work that keeps teaching us how to see.

Now let me ask you something I keep returning to: if every product is really a service in disguise, what exactly are you marketing when you think you are marketing a thing? 🤔