Putting the “service” into B2B marketing: key developments in service research and their relevance for B2B

What is it about?

We identify and discuss in this article four broad and related themes from the service literature that can stimulate business-to-business (B2B) marketing research and practice. First, we highlight the implications for capturing value in our economies with their rapidly increasing specialization and related growth in B2B services. Specifically, we explain where B2B firms should focus on to gain bargaining power in the value chains of the future. Second, an additional strategy to enhance a B2B firm’s power to capture value is servitization which allows firms to get closer to their customers, increase their switching costs, and build strategic partnerships. We explore how firms can use service productization to enhance their chances of successful servitization. Third, servitization is expensive, and productivity and scalability are often a challenge in B2B contexts. These issues are tackled in a recent service research stream on cost-effective service excellence (CESE) where we derive implications for B2B firms. Fourth and related to CESE, latest developments in intelligent automation (IA) offer exciting opportunities for B2B services to be made more scalable.

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