A Social Institution: Co-creating value with your milkman

Seminar abstract

Service-dominant logic (SD-logic) holds that social institutions and their coordination mechanisms contribute to value cocreation within a service-ecosystem.

This research investigates every day, interaction processes within a traditional, nocturnal, recurrent doorstep-delivery service ecosystem in Britain.

It employs ethnographic fieldwork with service providers (‘milkmen’) and semi-structured interviews with customers. Customers’ online feedback is further used to enrich understanding of ‘the milkman’s’ value proposition.

Time, place, and asynchronous interactions (which have been relevant to research in anthropology), are then linked with the existing SD-logic understanding of value co-creation. Using Ingold’s (1993) perspective, the doorstep becomes a ‘taskspace’, where a pattern of dwelling activities, temporality of rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance occur.

Viewed in this way, it becomes evident that (regular) rhythms, (contextual) romanticization and (interactive) relationships are part and parcel of place within the value proposition. As part of ‘place’, the effect these elements have on value co-creation becomes weightier: the effects derive from mutual projections, reflections, and individual understandings of customers’ doorsteps as a shared- temporally-located interaction ‘places’ or ‘taskspaces’’.

Hence, the underlying mechanisms by which value is co-created in an iconic service ecosystem are revealed.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We welcome you to join us online on Wednesday 2 February 2022 at 12pm.

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Speaker bio

Dr Philippa Ward is Reader in Services Marketing at Gloucestershire Business School, University of Gloucestershire, UK, with over 25 years of retail and academic experience, she has a range of journal and book publications and over 30 doctoral completions.

Philippa’s research centres on the effects of situational factors on consumers, the psychological and sociological determinants of consumption and the exploration of value. She is a passionate advocate for the application of a wider range of methods in marketing research and for transdisciplinarity.

Philippa can be contact by email.