Name : Waworuntu, Evi

Journal of Market Offerings as Relievers and Enablers: Building On the Service Dominant Logic of
Marketing

Summary
The service-based dominant logic of marketing posits that customers buy market offerings, which
render services, which create value.
The authors’ framework focuses on the value-creating function of a market offering that relieves
customers from doing something or enables customers to self-produce the desired outcome.
Substitutive relationships between marketing offerings occur when the customer’s self-production
activity combines with some enablers to substitute for a reliever. On the basis of this substitution in use,
the authors consider four strategic perspectives. They then provide some implications with regard to
innovation management, segmenting, positioning, and customer lifetime value. Where market analysis
should be expanded in the following ways:
- Analyze each market offering’s relieving and enabling functions.
- Study the factors that drive self-production and relate them to the market offering’s relieving
and enabling functions.
- Analyze the four strategic perspectives illustrated in Figure 2 and assess whether there is a
reliever opportunity, enabler threat, reliever threat, or enabler opportunity for the market
offering;
- Deploy these insights to recreate the marketing strategy in such areas as defining market
boundaries and avoiding myopia, detecting weak signals that indicate future shifts in the
market, designing and managing innovations, segmenting markets, positioning market offerings,
and calculating customer lifetime value on a need rather than a category basis.

Opinion
It is interesting that the framework provided by this study attempts to combine customers and firms
perspectives by studying the relieving and enabling function of market offerings in response to the
service-dominant logic of marketing that argues that product-based tools and concepts should be
reconsidered. This actually opens up my mind about what marketing offerings can be and that
marketers have wider strategies on how to choose a positioning of the offerings in the marketplace. This
concept of thinking is such out of the box intelligently and creatively that I appreciate and that most
likely for me to consider if one day I have a chance to become a marketer.