Innovation in marketing and services in the context of digital transformation

Lorea Narvaiza [*]Lorea Narvaiza is a professor of marketing and Full Professor of Management at Deusto Business School and academic coordinator of the ADE+International Management Skills degree program. Her main areas of research focus on servitization, digital sertization, marketing, and cooperatives.

Deusto Business School, España

Rodrigo Rabetino [**]Rodrigo Rabetino is a professor of Strategic Management and Full Professor at the School of Management at the University of Vaasa, Finland. He is a renowned expert in the field of servitization and product-service systems, innovation in business models, and strategy as practice.

School of Management, University of Vaasa, Finlandia
Guest editors

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18543/bee.3441

Published online: February 2026

Copyright

Marketing seeks to create value and deliver it to the market, while simultaneously capturing value from the market. To do this, it seeks to connect the unmet needs of the customer with the solutions offered by a company, ensuring that both parties benefit (Kotler, 2020). From the 2010s to the present, the era of marketing in which we are immersed could be called the era of engagement and new-age technology, i.e., the Engagement and New-Age Technology Era (Kumar et al., 2025). This era is characterised, on the one hand, by more demanding, informed, and hyperconnected customers, and on the other hand, by the emergence of new technologies and shorter product life cycles.

In this context, organisations must constantly rethink the creation and delivery of value, and marketing must seek to generate authentic connections, solve real problems, and offer personalised experiences through strategies supported by digital channels and data analysis. Today's marketing discipline must achieve a holistic understanding of the needs and behaviours of its customers across all platforms, devices, and diverse products and services (Kumar et al., 2021). In this sense, to achieve the necessary knowledge of customers and consumers, the integration of advanced analytical and research methods with an emphasis on data has transformed marketing decision-making. Organisations that have adopted these tools have gained an advantage by predicting consumer needs, adapting strategies in real time and achieving measurable results (Kumar et al., 2025).

Likewise, in order to develop innovative marketing, organisations must focus their efforts on strategically developing new products, services, and experiences, accompanied by processes that simultaneously generate value for the consumer, and achieve organisational growth and differentiation in the market. For all these reasons, we can say that marketing innovation has become central to the sustainable competitive advantage of organisations (Rabetino et al., 2024).

Regarding value creation through the addition of services, in 1988 Sandra Vandermerwe and Juan Rada coined the term Servitization in an article entitled "Servitization of Business: Adding value by adding services", which has been a fundamental article on which a rich line of academic research has subsequently been developed (Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988). Servitisation, which refers to the incorporation of services into product offerings to add value, began to be studied in the manufacturing industry. Numerous authors have studied the benefits of adding new services to existing products (Rabetino et al., 2021), the situation of servitisation in different geographical contexts (Baines et al., 2009; Kamp and Alcalde, 2014) and servitization for territorial competitiveness (Vendrell-Herrero and Wilson, 2017; Knapp et al., 2025). However, the difficulties of servitisation have also been analysed, in what has been termed the servitisation paradox, namely that despite servitisation in an organisation, the expected benefits are sometimes not achieved (Gebauer, et al., 2005; Kohtamäki et al., 2020).

In recent decades, digitalisation has given new impetus to innovation and servitisation. On the one hand, the emergence of digital technologies has opened up numerous possibilities for innovation, as customer expectations have increased, and this incorporation of novel technologies has had an impact on companies' business models, processes, and culture (Zabala et al., 2022). In this vein, various aspects have been examined, such as the design and delivery of digital services, the development of new business models and revenue streams, and the role of value creation ecosystems in driving innovation through co-creation (Lusch and Nambisan, 2015).

Thus, the term Digital Service Innovation (DSI) has attracted growing interest among researchers from various disciplines (Favoretto et al., 2022; Rabetino et al., 2024; Opazo-Basáez, et al., 2022; Vargo et al., 2024; Narvaiza et al., 2024). This interest in DSI has been particularly relevant in business-to-business (B2B) markets, where digital services have the potential to transform traditional business models and improve competitive advantage (Opazo-Basáez et al., 2022; Kowalkowski et al., 2024; Narvaiza et al., 2025).

Despite the growing interest in studying innovation in marketing and services, there are still many gaps to be filled. It is therefore necessary to delve deeper into this area, both to contribute to the advancement of knowledge from a theoretical perspective and to promote its transfer to business practice, thereby improving managerial decision-making.

Therefore, with the aim of exploring the intersection of marketing, service innovation, and digital transformation, this special issue includes contributions from both the industrial sector (B2B) and companies that target end consumers (B2C). It brings together contributions from different sectors (agricultural machinery, car manufacturing, packaging, market research, innovative companies, and luxury fashion, among others). In terms of methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative studies have been used. Geographically, the manuscripts have been developed on various continents (the Americas and Europe) and in various countries (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Peru). Finally, we would like to highlight that this issue brings together ten academic contributions and two guest articles with a more business-oriented approach.

All of the above contributes to a special issue that offers a melting pot of highly thought-provoking and varied contributions in the field of marketing and service innovations in the context of digital transformation.

References

Baines, T. S., Lightfoot, H., Benedettini, O., Whitney, D., & Kay J. M. (2009). “The adoption of servitization strategies by UK-based manufacturers," Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture, 224(5), 815-829. https://doi.org/10.1243/09544054JEM1567

Favoretto, C., Mendes, G. H. S., Oliveira, M. G., Cauchick-Miguel, P. A., & Coreynen, W. (2022). From servitisation to digital servitisation: how digitalisation transforms companies' transition towards services. Industrial Marketing Management, 102, 104-121.

Gebauer, H., Fleisch, E. & Friedli, T. (2005). Overcoming the service paradox in manufacturing companies. European Management Journal, 23(1), 14–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2004.12.006.

Kamp, B. & Alcalde, H. (2014). Servitisation in the Basque Economy. Strategic Change, 23(5-6), 359-374.

Knapp, T. U., Estensoro, M., Narvaiza, L., Poeppelbuss, J., Eizmendi, O., & O’Higgins, C. (2025). Territorial Servitization: Learnings from Basque Country and Ruhr Valley, Orkestra, https://doi.org/10.18543/UVXD8556

Kohtamäki, M., Einola, S., & Rabetino, R. (2020). Exploring servitisation through the paradox lens: Coping practices in servitisation. International Journal of Production Economics, 226, 107619.

Kotler, P. (2020). Marketing and Value Creation. Journal of Creating Value, 6(1), 10-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2394964320903559

Kowalkowski, C., Wirtz, J., & Ehret, M. (2024). Digital service innovation in B2B markets. Journal of Service Management, 35(2),280-305.https://doi.org/10.1108/josm-12-2022-0403.

Kumar, V., Rajan, B., & Gupta, S. (2025). Tracing the evolution of the marketing discipline through the lens of theory and practice: a journal-centric view. Journal of Business Research, 188, 115114.

Kumar, V., Ramachandran, D., & Kumar, B. (2021). Influence of new-age technologies on marketing: a research agenda. Journal of Business Research. 2021;125:864–877. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.01.007 [ DOI ] [ Google Scholar ]

Lusch, R. F., & Nambisan, S. (2015). Service innovation: a service-dominant logic perspective. MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems, 39(1), 155-175. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2015/39.1.07.

Narvaiza, L., Campos, J. A., Martín-Peña, M. L., & Díaz-Garrido, E. (2024). Characterising digital service innovation: phases, actors, functions and interactions in the context of a digital service platform. Journal of Service Management, 35(2), 253-279.

Narvaiza, L., Campos, J. A., Martín-Peña, M. L., & Díaz-Garrido, E. (2025). “Unveiling digital service readiness: exploring customer and manufacturer organisational perspectives in digital service innovation”, Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEIM-04-2024-0210

Opazo-Basáez, M., Vendrell-Herrero, F., & Bustinza, O. F. (2022), “Digital service innovation: a paradigm shift in technological innovation”, Journal of Service Management, 33(1), 97-120.

Rabetino, R., Kohtamäki, M., Brax, S. A., & Sihvanen, J. (2021). “The tribes in the field of servitization: Discovering latent stream across 30 years of research ”, Industrial Marketing Management, 95, 70-84.

Rabetino, R., Kohtamäki, M. & Huikkola, T. (2024). “Digital service innovation (DSI): a multidisciplinary (re)view of its origins and progress using bibliometric and text mining methods”, Journal of Service Management, 35, 176-201.

Vandermerwe, S., & Rada, J. (1988). “Servitisation of Business: Adding value by adding services”, European Management Journal, 6(4), 314–324.

Vargo, S. L., Fehrer, J. A., Wieland, H., & Nariswari, A. (2024). “The nature and fundamental elements of digital service innovation”, Journal of Service Management, 35(2), 227-252.

Vendrell-Herrero, F., & Wilson, J. R. (2017). Servitization for territorial competitiveness: Taxonomy and research agenda. Competitiveness Review: An International Business Journal, 27(1), 2-11.

Zabala K., Campos J. A., & Narvaiza, L. (2022). “Moving from a goods- to a service-oriented organisation: a perspective on the role of corporate culture and human resource management”, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 37(6), 1197–1207. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-11-2020-0497

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[*] Lorea Narvaiza is a professor of marketing and Full Professor of Management at Deusto Business School and academic coordinator of the ADE+International Management Skills degree program. Her main areas of research focus on servitization, digital sertization, marketing, and cooperatives.

[**] Rodrigo Rabetino is a professor of Strategic Management and Full Professor at the School of Management at the University of Vaasa, Finland. He is a renowned expert in the field of servitization and product-service systems, innovation in business models, and strategy as practice.

More information about the authors at the end of this article.

This study was supported by the individual affiliation of the authors and they declare no conflict of interest.