To Innovate or Not to Innovate? The Impact of Service Innovation on Customer-Based Brand Equity

摘要

Marketing scholars have focused largely on innovations with tangible products-technological innovation and new product development.Since the 1980s, there is a growing body of research that applies goods-centered approaches to address service-specific issues(Lusch and Nambisan 2015;Vargo and Lusch 2008).However, few studies focus on service innovation, which is the primary source of offering value propositions to benefit customers(Dotzel et al.2013). A”pro-change”bias(Rogers 1976), which assumes that”innovations are always good and should be adopted by everyone,”may be misleading in innovation research.Service innovation involves risk, just as does product innovation(Storey et al.2016).Therefore, can we identify the mechanisms that underlie customers’perception about service innovation? What can the firms do to improve the acceptance rate of such innovation? What is the positive and negative impact of this transformation if not managed well? A review of literature indicates mat important gaps still exist.To address these problems, this research explores different types of service innovation.Using knowledge management theory and the service-profit-chain model, we propose a conceptual framework to explain how service innovation could affect external and internal service quality, further influencing the customer-based brand equity.