This study explores the visual aesthetics of organizational space by contrasting coworking spaces with traditional open-plan offices. Drawing on signaling theory and symbolic interactionism, we examine how ambience communicates symbolic meaning. Employing an archaeological approach to retrieve large-scale online photo data from Coworker and Pinterest, we then apply AI-driven deep learning visual contrast analysis to reveal clear aesthetic distinctions in organizational space. Coworking spaces evoke a homely, dining-room-like ambiance, with artwork, plants, warmer color palettes, and a more homely and hospitable ambience. Traditional open-plan offices, by contrast, tend toward cooler colors and industrial design elements. Findings suggest that coworking spaces visually signal greater affective and sensory value, promoting belonging, creativity, and warmth. The study contributes to organizational space theory by theorizing how visual aesthetics act as symbolic cues that shape workplace experiences and by introducing a methodological framework that integrates AI-based analysis with interpretive meaning-making. 

While convenient experiences have become the epitome of modern consumption, this has led to ecological repercussions and serves as an underpinning driver of linear economies. To understand why this connection between convenience and environmental degradation is so strong, we examine convenience as a mindset, which affects our ways of being, thinking, and doing. The prevailing individual-centric convenience mindset is characterized by a focus on minimizing resource expenditure for personal benefits—often leading to short-term gratification—which inhibits the transition to regenerative circular economies. The individual-centric convenience mindset adheres to an outdated marketing perspective, emphasizing economic exchange rather than contemporary marketing that prioritizes value creation and seeks to extend benefits beyond individuals to society as a whole. The theorizing of convenience has accordingly failed to sufficiently evolve. To address this problem, we propose an alternative collective-centric convenience mindset grounded in stewardship principles, where individuals prioritize collective benefits and long-term sustainability over immediate personal gain. Our paper reviews and critiques current convenience conceptualizations and advocates for a paradigm shift toward a collective-centric approach. This study expands the theoretical scope of the convenience phenomenon from an individual-level phenomenon to the collective level. We contribute to the theoretical foundations of sustainability in marketing theory and practice by offering an alternative that aligns individual actions with broader societal and ecological imperatives. 

In sectors across the experience economy—from live sports to festivals, nightlife entertainment, private members’ clubs, and invite-only events—firms compete by staging social atmospheres. When firms successfully stage social atmospheres, they benefit from enhanced customer experiences, loyalty, and place attachment. However, social atmospheres often fail when firms struggle to bring together the “optimal” mix of customers. Yet marketing research offers limited insight into how firms can attract and select heterogeneous customers who fit together productively to create meaningful shared experiences of place. Accordingly, this article draws on aesthetic work literature to conceptualize social atmosphere curation—the process through which firms manage customer heterogeneity to achieve social fit as a means to stage social atmospheres. Through an ethnographic study of Berlin's iconic electronic music club scene, this article reveals a three-stage social atmosphere curation model, comprising curation mechanisms of cultivation, selection, and mystification. This research advances marketing scholarship's understanding of social atmospheres, customer heterogeneity, and marketplace inclusion and exclusion. By outlining the managerial tasks associated with each curation mechanism, this research provides actionable guidance for managers across various service contexts on how to curate the right crowd to deliberately stage social atmospheres.

Consumer co-creation, an approach in which consumers and organizations jointly innovate, can yield valuable knowledge about consumers' needs and how to satisfy these needs. Yet, innovating with consumers is challenging due to their varying levels of commitment, skills, and motivations. In this research, we focus on challenges we cluster as cognition- and affect-driven and examine how these challenges can be addressed using a design thinking approach. Building on the insights gained from interviews with key co-creation stakeholders (n = 73) and three focus groups with experts in design thinking and co-creation, we develop a grounded process model facilitating co-creation with consumers. More specifically, we distill three co-creation phases (labeled as co-creating context, content, and confluence), consisting of eight constituent activities and resulting dynamics that are cognitive or affective in nature. The distilled affective dynamics manifest in ideation confidence, empathy for diverse perspectives, pleasurable engagement, and being creatively inspired; the distilled cognitive dynamics manifest in an expanded knowledge base and an enhanced ability to analyze and evaluate information. Our grounded model is integrative and responds to calls to further examine affective influences within innovation and organization. Furthermore, our research advances the theoretical substance of design thinking by explaining underlying mechanisms at play that make design thinking an effective approach. Finally, our results add to the literature on consumer co-creation by developing a robust process model that leverages design thinking and adopts a multistakeholder approach to optimize consumer co-creation outcomes. In terms of managerial implications, our research presents a structured framework with phases and (micro)activities that will help organizations to actively involve consumers in their innovation process.

Companies invest considerably in event experiences; however, many are criticised for hosting events without understanding the full extent of their impact, or how to optimise their design. To benefit from event experiences, it is critical to consider not only how customers engage with the event, but also how event engagement transfers to engagement with the host brand to ultimately drive brand loyalty. This paper empirically explores the role of customer event engagement in facilitating brand engagement, within the context of branded marketing event experiences. Surveying attendees of such branded event experiences, six Australian wine brands, running 10 diverse events, agreed to collaborate in the research, yielding a total response of 274 participants. Results indicate that, for emotional, sensorial, pragmatic and relational experiences, event engagement fully mediates the relationship with customer brand engagement. Furthermore, it is the engagement with the host brand, rather than engagement with the event, that facilitates the effect on behavioural intentions of loyalty. These findings suggest that viewing engagement with a single focus (i.e., only event or only brand engagement) provides limited insight and does not uncover the true impact of event experiences; it is only through exploring the interrelationships between the engagement foci that we can truly understand how event experiences impact behavioural brand loyalty. This offers important managerial implications to facilitate engagement transfer (i.e., between event and brand), while drawing on associative network theory to explain how customer engagement spills over from the event to the brand and better account for the interdependence across engagement objects.

Resources are central to value creation processes. Hence, marketing and service research rely heavily on conceptualisations of resources and resource integration for theory building efforts. One of the most widely accepted marketing lenses on resources and resource integration is the service-dominant (S-D) logic. Depicting resources as becoming and contextual, S-D logic argues that their usefulness co-depends on other resources. Some assumptions of S-D logic have been challenged particularly its dichotomous categorisation of operand and operant resources. To inform ongoing S-D logic theorising, our article problematises the multiple and contradictory ontological views upon resources and resource integration present within S-D logic. Moving beyond critique, we propose concrete means for reconciling these contradictions. Seeing a parallel between S-D logic's ontological inconsistencies and past ontological disagreements in the philosophy of science, we draw on the philosophical perspective of Karen Barad to develop a consistent onto-epistemological foundation for conceptualising the becoming nature of resources in S-D logic. The theory adaptation we perform enhances the applicability and explanatory capacity of S-D logic, while also offering a more robust and rigorous foundation for marketing and service research at large and giving managers new means to make sense of co-dependent resource phenomena.

In the 1960s, influential thinkers defined design as a rational problem-solving approach to deal with the challenges of sustainable human development. In 2009, a design consultant and a business academic selected some of these ideas and successfully branded them with the term “design thinking.” As a result, design thinking has developed into a stream of innovation management research discussing how to innovate faster and better in competitive markets. This article aims to foster a reconsideration of the purposes of design thinking moving forward, in view of the sustainable development challenges intertwined with accelerating innovation in a perpetual economic growth paradigm. To this end, we use a problematization method to challenge innovation management research on design thinking. As part of this method, we first systematically collect and critically analyze the articles in this research stream. We uncover a prominent focus on economic impact, while social and environmental impacts remain largely neglected. To overcome this critical limitation, we integrate design thinking with responsible innovation theorizing. We develop a framework for responsible design thinking, explaining how to apply this approach beyond a private interest and competitive advantage logic, to address sustainable development challenges, such as climate change, resource depletion, poverty, and injustice. The framework contributes to strengthening the practical relevance of design thinking and its theoretical foundations. To catalyze this effort, we propose an agenda for future research. 

Many marketing phenomena involve a group’s collective experiences; however, marketing research largely focuses on an individual’s experiences. This research argues that individual-level theorizing alone is inadequate to capture collective experiences, such as how families, teams, or business customers experience good and/or services. This article thus aims to conceptualize actor experience as encompassing both individual and collective experiences. We draw on S-D logic and phenomenology to describe how experience emerges for individual and collective actors. We then demonstrate the application of our conceptualization by informing a central marketing notion: the determination of value. More specifically, we delineate two types of value determination, value experience and value attribution, and discuss how social interaction and institutional factors influence them. This study contributes to marketing literature with the conceptualization of actor experience that can be applied to the study of collective phenomena and to S-D logic metatheory by advancing the understanding of value determination.

Purpose: Service managers increasingly strive to achieve sustainability through strategies centered on circularity. With a focus on saving, extending and (re)generating resources and their enclosing service systems, circularity can contribute to environmental, social and financial gains. Yet, the notion of circularity is surprisingly understudied in service research. This article seeks to provide an initial conceptual understanding of circular service management, introducing illustrative strategies and research priorities for circular service management. This paper provides a roadmap for scholars, practitioners and policymakers to develop a deeper understanding of the opportunities from adopting circular services. Design/methodology/approach: The authors explore the concept of circular service management by drawing upon existing literature on sustainability, circularity and service research. Strategies of circular service management and research priorities emerge on the basis of industry best practice examples and research on sustainability challenges and opportunities. Findings: Service researchers have largely ignored the concept and role of circularity for service businesses. Extant research on the topic nearly exclusively features in non-service journals and/or does not seek to advance service theory through circularity. This article argues that circular service management enables the implementation of service thinking in the pursuit of sustainability and outlines four types of circular service management strategies. Originality/value: The authors introduce the concept of circular service management and highlight the role of service research for designing and managing circular systems and operations. This article also offers a research agenda connecting managerial challenges and opportunities with key service research priorities for circular service management. This provides a roadmap for scholars, practitioners and policymakers to develop a deeper understanding of pursuing circular services, thereby contributing to a more sustainable future.