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New Ideas, Fresh Thinking
Edited by Ross Gordon
Introduction
The move from goods-dominant logic to service-dominant logic (S-D logic), with an accompanying emphasis on the co-creation of value ([57] Lusch and Vargo, 2006; [85], [84], [83] Vargo and Lusch, 2008a, b, c), is reshaping our understanding of markets and marketing. A central and fundamental concept of S-D logic is that value is only created when a product or service is consumed or used ([82] Vargo and Lusch, 2004); as such it challenges directly the last 200 years of goods-dominant 4P thinking underpinning marketing exchange and conceptions of value as embedded in a product or service ([5] Ballantyne and Varey, 2008). Greer and Lei's review of studies from several disciplines including: innovation, strategy, management, marketing and information technology, shows the increasing importance of various forms of collaboration ([33] Greer and Lei, 2012) whereby co-creation of value has become the prevalent approach ([10] Bilgram et al. , 2011). For marketers and consumer researchers, the term has come to represent the many ways in which consumers and producers might collaborate to create value for mutual benefit ([75] Schau et al. , 2009).
The move to value co-creation is not the only antecedent for the recent interest in more collaborative, participatory ways of working in social marketing ([20] Collins et al. , 2012; [13] Bryant et al. , 2007). A rich and instructive heritage is woven through a variety of disciplines in the social and health sciences, such as education ([31] Freire, 2000; [46] Kemmis and McTaggart, 2005), public health ([43] Israel et al. , 1998), community development ([29] Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991), theology ([9] Berryman, 1987) and international development ([16] Chambers, 1997; [40] Hickey and Mohan, 2005). In the UK, policymakers' attention is turning ever more to concepts such as community engagement, which assumes public services that involve their users are likely to be of higher quality and more relevant to the communities they serve ([76] SCDC, 2010), and co-production, which posits that "people who use services contribute to the production of services" and is based on the insight that service users bring expertise and assets which can help improve those services ([66] Needham and Carr, 2009, p. 4). There is also growing interest in what has...