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The marketing discipline has struggled to develop an accepted general theory and even more specific theories recounting relevant phenomena within marketing are relatively few. This comment is offered not as criticism, but as a simple recognition of the reality that marketing is a very young discipline. As such, scholars have and will disagree over precisely what is the core concept of marketing. Is it exchange, attitude, satisfaction, trust, quality, or another concept that, like these, often remains defined without consensus or clarity?
Recently, the emergence of service-dominant logic has placed the emphasis on a small number of concepts that might vie for the title as the preeminent marketing concept ([21] Vargo and Lusch, 2008a). Service and value are two logically inseparable concepts which qualify as candidates for that title. Service is clearly contrasted from services as the activities comprising the using of resources to benefit another ([22] Vargo and Lusch, 2008b), and value is the concept that captures the result of service. Both value and service are ontologically essential in describing marketing phenomena and offering normative marketing prescriptions. Value then is seen as a measuring stick assessing the extent to which service has succeeded.
The focus of this special issue and of this paper is on the concept of value. While few have denied that value is an important marketing concept, marketing research has adopted many varying views on value, and value often has taken a back seat to more focal concepts such as quality and satisfaction. Yet, Drucker recognized that the marketing concept is all about the creation of value for customers, and thus value is essential to managerial strategy ([19] Uslay et al. , 2008). Value is also recognized in the current American Marketing Association (AMA) definition of marketing ([12] Lotti and Lehmann, 2007):
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Value must be understood to understand marketing. Thus, it seems fitting that we take a closer look at just what value is, why it is so important, and how companies and consumers work together to produce value. This paper briefly reviews key works on value and expands on its key aspects theoretically....