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Value in Marketing and Sustainability: History
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Contributor: Anna K. Zarkada

Value is the result of the combined, conscious, and creative actions of caring, which promote sustainable prosperity. Despite its centrality in marketing theory, value is treated in the literature as a self-evident, abstract term denoting concepts as diverse as the desire to acquire goods or enjoy services, the benefits derived from using a product, the price of an object, or a customer’s contribution to business profits. This approach leads to amoral marketing decision-making focused on extracting value from stakeholders and accumulating it in the form of shareholder wealth. In this framework, the negative consequences of marketing actions for society and the natural environment are simply dismissed as externalities. This is not sustainable as it degrades the environment and increases wealth and human welfare disparities between individuals, groups, and societies. Drawing on conceptualisations of value from the fields of philosophy, semiotics, and economics, value is here defined as the result of the combined, conscious, and creative actions of caring which promote sustainable prosperity. As such, value is understood to be co-created by the interactions of various stakeholders and positioned as the link between individuals, companies, markets, society, and the natural environment. Marketing theory has traditionally viewed value creation and exchange as the result of dyadic interactions. The socioeconomic and technological milieu of the 21st century, however, creates a business ecosystem characterised by digitalisation, interconnectivity, and decentralisation which means that, the number of participants in value co-creation networks is increasing and potentially tending towards infinity. Consequently, marketing is reconceptualised as the values-driven mechanism for value formation, valuation, symbolism, exchange facilitation, and integration of the resources required for value co-creation and distribution aiming at contributing to sustainable prosperity. Virtuous marketers and mindful marketing practice can ensure the optimal use of resources and the maximisation and equitable distribution of welfare in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to continue to generate and enjoy value. Thus, by placing value at the centre of the business ecosystem, marketing contributes to sustainable prosperity.

  • value
  • value co-creation
  • value-dominant logic
  • service-dominant logic
  • stakeholders
  • sustainability
  • sustainable prosperity
  • marketing
  • philosophy
Value is commonly used in the marketing literature in the context of pricing as just another word for price [1], an understanding of what you get for what you pay [2], or to distinguish offerings which are affordable to the targeted consumers [2] (e.g., ‘value range’ [1]) from those they would have to make a greater sacrifice to acquire (e.g., luxuries, or ‘high value’ products [1]). It is also used to denote the fundamental positioning and promotional devices—the product or brand value proposition [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]—around which resources are organised to form a service system connecting configurations of resources with other configurations of resources to form the exchange mechanisms [10] constituting economies. Finally, the term is central to the consumer behaviour discourse, irrespective of which theoretical and philosophical standpoint the researchers adopt.
When used in the context of consumption, the term ‘value’ is rarely defined and left to imply “the experience gained by satisfying a vague desire for acquisition” [11] or to denote an abstract evaluation related to quality perceptions [2][12] leading to customer satisfaction [13]. In this sense, the construct of value, usually measured as value perception or customer perceived value (CPV) [14], is treated as a factor directly or indirectly affecting consumer behaviours [12]—such as engagement with a brand [15], willingness to pay [9], or to pay a price premium [16], purchase [17], re-purchase, loyalty [13], and positive word of mouth (WoM) [14]—which determine firm performance [12].
More importantly, the concept of value is also foundational to marketing thought as it is the “underlying rationale for the Marketing Concept” [18] and the core of the standard definition of products as “entities that can be acquired, used, or disposed of in ways that potentially provide value” [19]. This approach to value has found its way to the very definition of the discipline as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value” [20].
There has been a long-standing discussion on the distinction between products and services along the continua of tangibility/intangibility, homogeneity/heterogeneity, etc., which is now clearly technologically and conceptually superseded [21][22][23]. Moreover, terms such as ‘offerings’ or ‘entities’ are too vague to represent relationships between resources, human endeavours, markets, and the socioeconomic system. So, I propose the universal use of the term ‘product’ to denote all entities and offerings, irrespective of whether they are physical, intangible, or a mixture of both [1], and experienced in the physical [2][24], digital [23][25], or phygital domain [12][26]. The term product can accurately represent “goods, services, ideas, events, or any other entities” [19] or experiences [12][27] which can be “acquired, used, or disposed of” [19] and in any way enjoyed. In essence, a product is any value-bearing entity, and so, product is the term I will hereafter use.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6020042

References

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