Customers’ everyday understanding of ‘value’ from a second-order cybernetic perspective

ABSTRACT

Value is in the centre of service and marketing. However, what does value mean to customers? The purpose of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of value from a customers’ perspective using a second-order cybernetics approach. We found that the word ‘value’ is recursively linked to 13 different ‘meanings’ indicating a variety of understandings of the term ‘value’. Furthermore, the findings support service-dominant logic where customers integrate their own resources (skills and knowledge) in the value co-creation process. Future research has to be aware of the different meanings, which are associated with value. Marketing managers need to understand, on the one hand, that value has a different meaning to their customer and on the other hand, what value means to their specific target groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Customer value
• value
• meaning
• eigenforms
• system theory
• second order cybernetics
• recursive operations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helge Löbler

Helge Löbler is a professor of management and marketing at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He studied cybernetics and economics at the universities of Stuttgart and Bonn. He received his PhD at Bonn in Economics. He has lectured at different international universities in Estonia, United States and China. His main research interests are social constructionism, system theory and philosophy of science and their impact on marketing, entrepreneurship and business education.

Michelle Wloka

Michelle Wloka is a research assistant and doctoral student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She studied media management and public relations at the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Germany and Newcastle University, UK. Her research focus around the issues of communication, language use, social constructionism and sustainability reporting.