Value in Marketing and Sustainability

Definition

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.

1. Introduction

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.

1.1. Aim and Overview of This Entry

Despite its centrality in the economic system, value is often described as an elusive concept [2], hard to define in the context of marketing and management [28,29,30,31] and even harder to distinguish from other related constructs such as quality, utility, worth, and price. Further confounding the problem, its description as “highly personal and idiosyncratic” [2] positions it in the unreachable realm of hard-to-research constructs. It is, however, a concept that has been central to philosophy for almost three millennia [32,33]. I here argue that we can draw on philosophy to expand and synthesise the extant marketing literature and contribute to the disambiguation of the concept of value in a way that can support further development of this exciting—and, pun intended, highly valuable—field of research for understanding human interactions.

Definitions have been central to human thinking from its earliest recorded products, such as Plato’s attempts to define ‘knowledge’ [34], ‘science’ [35], or ‘love’ [36], to Anselm’s definition of ‘God’ as proof of God’s existence, all the way through the Baconian and Cartesian foundations of modern science, to Tarski’s definition of ‘truth’ [37]. Debates regarding the categorisation and logic of definitions have been central to philosophy [37] and the cornerstone of science [38]. It is generally accepted that by declaring the essential attributes that form a concept’s essential nature [39] and identifying its ‘real’ defining characteristics, what Locke [40] called ‘voluntary combinations of simple ideas’, scientists express their fundamental beliefs about the boundaries of their own discipline and its purpose as well as their prevailing views of the world, life, and morality. So, this entry seeks to identify and highlight the underlying conceptualisations of value in the key streams of the marketing discipline with the help of philosophy and with the aim to contribute to sustainability in its broader sense.

1.2. Conceptual Boundaries of the Entry

This Encyclopaedia entry focuses on ‘value’, a concept that, as demonstrated in the preceding discussion, lies at the heart of marketing but is neither clearly nor functionally defined [41]. “[O]ne man’s idea of gold… is different from another’s… because he has put in, or left out of his, some simple idea which the other has not” [40]. This has not changed since the 17th century, when John Locke wrote these words. This entry identifies the ‘simple ideas’ which comprise value and explores the ways in which they have been combined to define ‘value’ for the purposes of marketing science. The marketing discipline is a branch of applied economics, which was developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries in the USA and Britain under German influences [42] and grew in the liberal democracy and capitalist framework [31]. Economics, however, is an applied branch of Western philosophy, so the path of marketing can be firmly traced back to the Eurocentric, Aristotelian-Cartesian, and Calvinist tradition [31]. This entry traces ‘value’ to its roots. It presents a review of the philosophical foundations necessary for understanding how value is used in marketing scholarship. It also identifies the underlying assumptions and definitions of value in the most prominent streams of the marketing literature, roughly reflecting its development in the late 20th and 21st centuries. The entry also discusses the concept of value in the context of the permacrisis circumstances of the 21st century through the sustainability problematization and seeks to identify a potential path for marketing to become the key mechanism contributing to the achievement of sustainable prosperity.

1.3. Purpose of the Entry

The purpose of this entry is to provide marketing, management, and social science researchers with a concise review of the underlying conceptualisations of value in the most popular streams of marketing thought and their limitations in addressing the permacrisis conditions of the 21st century, with an emphasis on the problems of sustainability and prosperity faced by businesses, economies, communities, and households.

The objectives of the entry are to:

• Map the foundations of contemporary understandings of value in the marketing literature.
• Uncover the underlying conceptualisation of value in the different streams of marketing theory and their limitations in addressing contemporary global problems.
• Present the emerging marketing paradigm centred on value, i.e., value-dominant logic.
• Discuss the underlying conceptualisation of value in the current theoretical and practical approaches to sustainability and their limitations in addressing practical problems.
• Synthesise the discussion into a map of the value ecosystem and propose a definition of value for marketing capable of supporting a refocusing of the discipline on global sustainability and sustainable prosperity.

1.4. Structure of the Entry

First, the philosophical foundations of conceptualisations of value which have found their way in the marketing literature are briefly presented with an emphasis on definitions and the distinctions between (a) use value and exchange value and (b) intrinsic, extrinsic, and pragmatic value. The philosophical discussion is summarised and linked to the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern contexts.

Then the marketing literature on the concept of value from the customer perspective is reviewed in a roughly chronological order from traditional 20th century approaches (the Goods-Dominant Logic and Services Marketing) and 21st century ones (the Service-Dominant Logic and Service Logic). Emphasis is placed on value as meaning, the axiology of customer value, and the problems caused by decoupling value from values, which, it is argued, lie at the heart of the so far unsuccessful attempts at sustainability. The discussion is completed by presenting the still-emerging Value-Dominant Logic and its implications for marketing and the socioeconomic system redesign for sustainability and global prosperity. The discussion combines a roughly chronological thematic analysis of both philosophy and marketing, focusing on value as meaning and the axiology of customer value, which brings the marketing literature back into its proper place in the general field of philosophy of value.

Finally, current and emerging value-driven and value-focused approaches to sustainability are reviewed so as to conclude with a new definition of value in the context of marketing, which integrates the individual and collective dimensions of value with personal and societal value systems in a way that globally promotes sustainable prosperity.

2. Foundations of Conceptualisations of Value in the Western Philosophical Tradition

This section reviews the definitions and conceptualisations of value and presents the fundamentals of value theory in a roughly chronological order through the key phases of the Western philosophical tradition. This choice does not imply that the relative contributions of other traditions to a philosophy of value are in any way less important or not as developed. It simply reflects the ontology and epistemology of the marketing discipline: its underlying assumptions about the relationships of humans with each other and with nature. The approach is adopted because of the fact that the intellectual roots and definitional frameworks of marketing are products of the Western tradition. Eastern and other philosophical traditions have had negligible to no impact on the formation of the conceptual foundations of marketing. There have been sporadic Marxist [43] and post-colonial [44] critiques of the Eurocentrism of marketing. However, the fact remains that the Global South is practically non-existent for the leading marketing journals, in which less than 3% of articles published are about the markets and consumers of North America and Western Europe [44]. Even in the rare articles in which the data comes from Asia or Africa, for example, the theories applied to interpret them are firmly situated in European social sciences and humanities and the Western-born and bred branch of economics, which have been identified as in need of “radical change” [45]. For this change to materialise, it is imperative that we understand the discipline’s fundamental concepts and their provenance. Value is such a concept; fundamental and permeating philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, and marketing.

2.1. Definitions of Value

Although in the marketing literature [4,12,46] the introduction of the philosophy of value is attributed to Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE) it was actually the pre-Socratics (7th c. BCE) [47,48,49,50], with the Protagorean “πάντων χρηµάτων µέτρον ἐστίν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν µέν ὄντων ὡς ἐστιν, τῶν δέ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν [34]” (commonly, but misleadingly narrowly, translated [47,49] as “of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not”) who laid its foundations and it was Plato (5th–4th c. BCE) [34,51] who first elaborated on it.

Contemporary philosophers [33,48] concur with Plato [34,51] and Aristotle [47,52,53] in that χρήμα (pronounced chrí̱ma) denotes much more than ‘thing’. It stands for value which encompasses [11]:

• The satisfaction and benefits derived from using something for a specific purpose (including the resources one controls or has access to).
• What is realised through the exchange of objects, money, skills, or anything that is perceived as useful for a purpose.
• The joy or admiration experienced in relation to an event, an occurrence, or an achievement.

The measure [47] of value is ἄνθρωπος (pronounced ánthropos), but not in the narrow sense of the “transient and impulsive whim” [11] of any one person, but in the sense of humanity—each and every one, but also all of us, past, present, and coming generations, all over the world. This view is consistent with Bertrand Russell’s philosophy of value expressed as “[w]e are ourselves the ultimate and irrefutable arbiters of value… It is we who create value and our desires which confer value” [54]. Russell’s ‘we’ encompasses human perception of the physical world, knowledge of nature and its laws, but also all that human beings can imagine and, by extension, create. So, “everything, real or imagined, can be appraised by us, and there is no outside standard to show that our valuation is wrong” [54]. So, the measure of value is the ability of the collective and indivisible capital—economic, cultural, social [55], symbolic [56], spiritual [57], and semantic [58] capital—to fulfil the aspirations and expectations of the community in which value is formed, exchanged, used, experienced, and enjoyed [11]. In this sense, value is contextual and value-dependent.

Plato [35] equates value with being good, as in a beautiful body, a virtuous soul, simple music and exercise which improve the soul and body, temperance, and everything that makes a life worth living. Plato’s approach thus gives value theory its place in the philosophical field of axiology (also known as normative ethical theory), which encompasses “classifying what things are good, and how good they are” and the related metaethical investigations related to “whether the objects of value are subjective psychological states, or objective states of the world” [59].

2.2. Use Value and Exchange Value

To resolve the objective/subjective conundrum, Aristotle [53,60,61,62] distinguished use value from exchange value. This distinction was brought to modern discourses through (to name some of the most recognisable of the authors on the economic dimension of value) Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx, who saw the two aspects of value as contradictory [31,46,63]. This contradiction can be seen in modern-day calculations of national wealth as the sum of all exchange value in any given economy [12] irrespective of the actual use value of the products in circulation.

Use value (also mentioned in the literature as value in use or value-in-use), according to Aristotle [53,60,61,62]—and those whose thought stems from or reflects the Cartesian logic—is the transient and “purely subjective meaning [which] can vary for the same article as between individuals” [46]. It reflects the value-bearing object’s ability to contribute to a person’s current personal objectives, and thus it is dependent on the motivation behind the person’s assessment of the value of getting involved with the object, and is valid only within a specific context and at a given time.

Exchange value (also mentioned in the literature as value in exchange or value-in-exchange), in the Aristotelian tradition [53,60,61,62], is “derived from use value as expressed through market demand” [46]. Seen under this light, exchange value is dependent on a combination of rarity and use value and, as such, collectively perceived and quasi-objective. In Marxism, exchange value is more concretely objective as it is defined as the quantity of human labour required to produce a commodity. Further to the amount of labour being measurable, the objective nature of exchange value rests in the fact that the labour-commodity relationship is only made possible by the socioculturally defined exchange system. In any given exchange system (what we usually call a market or an economy), any commodity, even one with no use value (such as a banknote), can stand as a sign of another commodity for the production of which a given quantity of human labour is required [64].

However, even use value requires some expenditure of effort to be enjoyed, so, essentially, both use and exchange value are derived from labour. Use value expresses the “qualitative aspect of work”, which according to Marx, transforms “useless matter into useful objects” [63], whilst exchange value represents the “purely quantitative, commensurable side of work: “abstract labor” [63]. The exchange principle, which underlies all marketing thought and forms the basis of capitalism, is actually premised on the Marxist conceptualisation of the process of equalisation of use and exchange value through exchange. Thus, the “socially necessary simple labor time” is the common substance of both types of value [63] and ultimately its objective, a commonly accepted measure.

In this sense, it follows that value is a meaning produced by the economic and cultural world through interpersonal as well as intra- and inter-group interactions within it [65]. And it is exactly the discrepancy between the exchange value of the commodity and the remuneration of the “socially necessary simple labor time” [63] which creates the plus value for the capitalist, in Marxist terms, or brand equity in contemporary marketing terms. Moreover, the capitalist process of exchange transforms use value into exchange value through a process of signification. Branding turns a product, which can be as mundane as toilet paper, into an icon inexorably tied to the cuteness of a Labrador puppy, a simulacrum (i.e., an image, representation, or imitation of itself) [66,67]. The market mechanism turns the brand into the most abstract form of signification, that of money, the absolute signifier; something with no use value whose purely exchange value is premised on the social convention of its being universally accepted as something “which stands for something else (emphasis in the original)” [64]. This multitude of abstractions becomes reality through the exchanges that constitute economic life—a transformation made possible only through trust.

It is in this process of transformation of use value to exchange value to use value that labour becomes invisible, and money embodies “pure exchange value [and] acquires the use value of the ultimate tool—the thing with which to achieve everything” [63]. Thus, the capitalist economic system is nothing but the mechanism for the creation, circulation, and increase in exchange value. After labour, use value also becomes invisible when, through the marketing function, products acquire “a broader range of meanings and become subject to representation, mythologization, mystification, and promotion which can increase their exchange value” [68].

2.3. Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Pragmatic Value

Both the use value and exchange value of object X imply that X serves a purpose for A, the person who owns it, or that, even though it does not meet A’s needs it is perceived as serving a purpose for B who owns Y which is of use to A who is willing to exchange X for Y. Objects X and Y only have value in relation to A and B. The pragmatists, also known as instrumentalists, such as Peirce, James, and Dewey, partially echo the utilitarianism of Hume and Mill, in seeing any object (including theories, linguistic construction, and value systems) as tools for the achievement of a person’s and a society’s objectives [32,33]. In this sense, pragmatism extends “the Aristotelian ideal of practical wisdom… combined with Nietzsche’s theoretical scepticism” [32] and results in seeking the truth in its practicality [32,33], which, in turn, we could extend to mean that value can only be understood as an interpretation of the object in question. Similarly, in the spirit of Hume and following Russell’s extension of Wittgenstein’s theory, we could understand value as a ‘logical construction’ interpreting ‘sense-data’, that is, “facts about the immediate contents of experience” [32]. This, however, would imply that value is not a quality of the world outside a person but simply a state of the person’s mind which would render ethical judgements (i.e., statements about what is “valuable, … really important, … the meaning of life, or … what makes life worth living, or … the right way of living” [69]) a logical impossibility [69,70].

Wittgenstein, of course, is not alone in these explorations of axiology and the concept of ‘absolute value’ [69]. Philosophers have for centuries pondered the possibility of an object having an intrinsic value, ‘in itself’ or ‘for its own sake’. This is known as intrinsic value and is distinguished from the instrumental value of things as means to an end, or for the sake of something else to which they are somehow related, which is known as extrinsic value [71]. The idea that something is good just because it is good is first encountered in Aristotle [52,53] but it was in the late 19th and early 20th century that the study of intrinsic value was advanced through questioning its ontology, exploring whether it is a cognitive evaluation or an emotional response, identifying its dimensions and consequences, and considering its relationship to circumstances and the moral sensitivity of the person perceiving an object as valuable. A common intellectual pursuit has also been to identify objects of intrinsic value [71].

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value has been challenged by pragmatist philosophers, such as John Dewey, Arthur Bentley, and Monroe Beardsley, who believed that there cannot be a timeless and universally accepted list of things that are intrinsically valuable. For pragmatists, all value is extrinsic and relative to some other value, which we can apply to choose between objects that fulfil “competing desires and ends which are incompatible with one another” [72]. Going past the Manichaeistic dichotomies of the Judeo-Christian modernity (“these time-honoured distinctions—between appearance and reality, theory and practice, knowledge and action, fact and value” [73]), the Deweyan humanists, who “are content to keep their feet planted on terra firma” [73] introduce the concept of pragmatic value: the measure of an object’s (be it a product, idea, belief, or action) usefulness, effectiveness, and practical consequences in solving problems and achieving real-world results.

To decide what is valuable, one would need to examine it against something else of value, which then would have to be assessed against something else. This would result in temporally and tentatively held values and an overall ‘problematic situation’ in which certain ends could justify any means [72,74]. Moreover, if we accept that there are things which are intrinsically valuable, then we run into “the danger of fixing on goals without reasonable regard to their means and consequences”, which can lead to a variety of “ills: fanaticism, utopianism, opportunism, and the rest” [74]. What could be acknowledged as having intrinsic value is “productive action [which] is intrinsically creative”, a condition, however, which does not exist in modernity because of the severance of consumption from production and of the act of production from the immediate satisfaction of the person producing the object. Thus, “the mechanical reign” and “frantically accelerated” production result in “most workers find[ing] no replenishment, no renewal and growth of mind, no fulfilment in work” [72]. The utilisation of an artisan’s abilities turns into “’labor’ drudgery, a task reluctantly performed”, its products are devoid of “esthetic elements”, and their consumers’ “consumptions are accidental ostentation and extravagance, not a normal consummation or fulfilment of activity” [72].

“[T]he separation of production and consumption, means and ends,” which leads to class divisions and economic crises [72] has, since 1922 when Dewey made these observations, been accelerating; inequalities have been rising, and the crises are becoming more frequent and severe. In the post-industrial world, the solidity of products has been substituted by the ethereal ‘culture of the simulacrum’ (a state of being in which the lines between reality and simulation become blurred) [31,75] and the extraction of surplus value becomes secondary to the control of knowledge [76,77] and monetizable attention. Ultimately, all value becomes subjugated to exchange value “to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced” [75]. Both the artisan of premodernity and the machinery of modernity are replaced by distributed systems [78] and the value production/consumption ecosystem takes on the characteristics of postmodern consumption, i.e., fragmentation, hyperreality, paradoxical juxtaposition of opposites, tolerance for difference and multiplicity, decentring of the subject, loss of commitment, reversals of production and consumption, and value realisation later in the consumption cycle [67,79,80,81,82,83]. This results in an amoral approach to value, as purely pragmatic and decoupled from values, a point to which we shall return.

2.4. Summary of the Conceptualisations of Value from the Perspective of Western Philosophy

The key points of the above brief presentation of the various conceptualisations of value are summarised in

Table 1. A summary of philosophical conceptualizations of value in their broader context.

Era	Premodern	Modern/Industrial	Postmodern/ Post-Industrial
Levels of organisation and presentation of concepts [84]	Self-Action (actors possess the power to produce results)	Interaction (results are produced by actions and reactions)	Transaction (attributions of ultimate, final, or independent entities, essences, or realities are inconsequential)
Nature of value	Intrinsic	Extrinsic	(irrelevant)
Locus of value realisation	Use value	Exchange value	Pragmatic value
Orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive mutations of the law of value [83]	Counterfeit	Production	Simulation

[31].

The postmodern conundrum of how to remain human and grounded in concrete reality in the fragmented and decentred hyperreality of paradoxical juxtapositions [80,82,85], which marketing propagates, can only be resolved by a return to unashamedly performing an axiological assessment [31,73]. Synthesising the above discussion, I propose that value cannot be examined in isolation from the underlying values of production, consumption, economic organisation, societal structures, human interactions, and the relationship between humanity and other inhabitants of the planet and with the planet. The axiological assessment needs to take into account not only the use value of products for their users, but also for the planet and society. Society can be taken to involve each and every stakeholder group (e.g., suppliers, retailers, competitors, employees, local communities, flora and fauna, future generations) directly or indirectly affected by the externalities (that is, the unintended consequences) of product (a) production (such as resource depletion or air and water pollution), (b) marketing (such as socially harmful advertising or cluttering of roadsides with hoardings and billboards), (c) use (e.g., passive smoking or injuries by faulty products), and (d) disposal (e.g., plastic wrapping polluting the oceans or landfill overload). Such an axiological assessment would entail individual users as well as society—through its democratically elected legislators and market oversight institutions in their role as representatives of the people and caretakers of the stakeholder groups that have no voice—taking a moral stance towards violations of the frameworks delineating marketing functions. These frameworks have been identified [86] as legal codes, professional and industry codes of practice and standards, and social norms. In this way, the axiological assessment of marketing practice would result in the mindful marketing [87,88,89] of products which “foster dignity and self-respect”, which are “functional and vital in the contribution which they make to human happiness”, and offered “at the right time consistent with their actual as well as potential earning power and capacities” [90].

Such an approach, I believe, would pave the way for sustainable prosperity by addressing corporate greed and consumer overconsumption, which are the root causes of plagues of the Western world, which, only a few years back, were pronounced extinct [91,92] but have recently returned with a vengeance, such as war, famines, erosion of the social fabric, rising inequalities and intolerance of the other, environmental degradation, and the re-emergence of authoritarianism [11]. This, however, would first require a review of the conceptualisation of value in the marketing discipline through which to pinpoint the required reconceptualization of marketing as a values-driven, value co-creation mechanism, aimed at advancing sustainable prosperity.

2.5. A Note on Value and Values

A small digression is needed at this point. In the ensuing discussion, the term ‘values’—a central one in philosophical investigations through time and cultures, one on which there is a vast body of social sciences and, especially, business-related literature [41]—is used in its common meaning of fundamentally important beliefs and assumptions of what is right and proper or good and desirable. Personal values develop through interactions [93] within cultural frameworks [94] and result in morals, the “socially agreed upon values relating to conduct” [93] which in turn gives life purpose and distinguishes it from just living [95]. A detailed discussion of values (such as in the protocol for the analysis of values [96]) is beyond the scope of this entry, so values here will be used to denote statements of commonly held beliefs about value.

Adopting the common use of the term is consistent with the understanding found in the marketing literature: values are applied by individuals to determine their course of action regarding what is worth pursuing in life, to align actions with beliefs, and to set priorities [97]. In this sense, values act as (a) behavioural motives [98] and restraints [99], (b) a moral compass, (c) bases for attitude formation [100,101], and (d) measures for judging business practices [102] and behaviours, including consumption ones [103], or valuations [104], i.e., estimations of the value of objects vis-à-vis the monetary expression of the sellers’ valuation, known as price [9,105,106].

3. The Concept of Value in the Marketing Literature

“Value research consists of two main literature streams: value creation processes (actors, activities, and resources involved in value creation) and value outcomes (the value customers experience)” [12]. This observation reflects the fact that the focus on the mechanism (creating value) for achieving an end state (delivering value) and the focus on the value of the end state (experiencing value) involve different levels of construals [23]. Philosophically, the two broad literature streams diverge because of the researchers’ focus on exchange value or use value but not on value as a single construct. The divergence of foci is prominent in the earlier marketing paradigms, the Goods-Dominant Logic (G-DL), and the Services Marketing literature, but becomes less obvious in 21st century works belonging to the Service Dominant Logic (S-DL) stream, with its emphasis on process rather than outcome [107], and approaches elimination in the emergent integrative paradigm of Value-Dominant Logic (V-DL). In this section, we will review the conceptualisations of value through these paradigms in a roughly chronological order of their appearance.

3.1. Value in the Context of Goods-Dominant Logic and the Services Marketing Literature

Traditionally, in the marketing literature, use value (explicitly discussed or implied as such) is firmly linked to a product being actually used by a consumer in broad terms [108] or strictly defined as “always determined by the customer during… use” [12]. This approach is more pronounced in the experiential marketing stream, which introduces the term ‘experiential value’, which reflects the negative–positive or strong–weak valence of a consumption process that takes into account the consumers’ values [109]. In this sense, value is relative to other evaluations and expressive of a preference [18]. Irrespective of its being regarded as a perception or an evaluation of an experience, value is described as inherently dynamic, procedurally and temporally determined [12], and interactively construed [18]. It is obvious that if value can be positive or negative, then it can be created or destroyed, depending on the interactions between the actors in the exchange and consumption process [110,111].

For most of the 20th century and the early 21st century, the marketing literature placed immense emphasis on (a) how to create value for customers so that they will be all the more willing to pay [99,112,113], or (b) how to create a value proposition that would maximise willingness to pay a premium [16] for the endowment of mundane products with powerful meaning [68] unrelated to their use value but increasing their exchange value, what Marx aptly termed ‘commodity fetishism’ [114].

3.1.1. Branding as a Manipulation of Use Value and Exchange Value Perceptions

Commodity fetishism—known as branding in the marketing vernacular—makes it the marketer’s job to craft signifiers of exchange value which are “generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value has been effaced” [75]. It has been argued [79] that value becoming a property of the image instead of a property of the product is a unique characteristic of postmodernity. It could indeed be a sign of the times, brought about by the development of the very function of marketing over most of the past 50 or so years The substitution of use value by exchange value is what branding does to products: it turns them from reality (the product with its use value) into a simulacrum of itself (the monetary, i.e., pure exchange value of the product, its brand equity, and the market capitalisation of the corporation marketing it). Because exchange value is the value of an image, however, it was inferred [31] that, like all images, exchange value develops in the way Baudrillard [66] described: from a reflection of basic reality, to masking first reality itself, and then the absence of reality, to eventually bearing no relation to any reality whatsoever, thus, becoming its own pure simulacrum. This obviously means that the labour involved in production, distribution, and use also turns into its own simulacrum at the rate at which globalisation, financialisation, and automation alienate both workers [115] and consumers from each other and from products by modularising production and distribution and decoupling them from consumption.

Another phenomenon of postmodernity is the deification of subjectivity [67] which is reflected in the marketing literature, especially the streams of branding and consumer culture theory (CCT), and shines in the most common approach to conceptualising value in the marketing literature as customer perceived value (CPV) or customer value (a term which, although commonly used, does offer a higher specificity than ‘value’ but can be easily confused with the value of a customer to the business, a danger also encountered by using the less common term ‘perceived customer value’ [116]). In the study of CPV, the closer we get to paying some attention to use value, the more we find it linked to the feelings and thoughts consumers form through using a product (most often specifically during receiving a service, as CPV is more often encountered in the services marketing literature). In its simplest form, value is a product attribute assigned by consumers on the basis of functional and practical benefits and emotional payoffs [116].

3.1.2. Product Characteristics as Expressions of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Value

The subjectivity of value, which Aristotle first identified [53,117] and the Enlightenment philosophers further elaborated, is acknowledged in the benefits being described as related to both the task and the outcome, and the user [2]. As such, they comprise salient intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions of the product. Intrinsic benefits are strategically created or added by the producer and/or seller, whilst extrinsic ones are communicated through signals aiming to enhance value perceptions, or they are manipulated so as to match customer definitions of value [2]. This approach, which is very common, is the source of the problem of the elusiveness of the concept of value, especially when it comes to its embeddedness in marketing practice, and its generally acknowledged critical importance for business performance [12].

Some help in a finer conceptualisation of value comes from the field of semiotics. Anything that is thought of, created, found, exchanged, and acquired, or used, experienced, and enjoyed, is a product, and it can be considered on five different performative value-bearing levels [64]:

• Physical (comprising its objectively perceivable characteristics such as weight and shape, or, for example, in the case of events, their type, time, and venue);
• Functional (the way in which the product “fulfills a certain function on the basis of certain laws” [64]);
• Economic (its exchange value or price, that is, its function as “the sign vehicle of other objects” [64]);
• Social (the significance others attach to the user of the product as a result of its use, in other words, its ability to bear symbolic capital [55,56,118,119]);
• Semantic (which means that the brand, the simulacrum of the product “is a cultural unit inserted into a system of cultural units with which it enters into certain relationships” [64].

3.1.3. Product Valuation

When customers interact with a product, they compare the benefits they accrue with the sacrifices they incur (such as the price they paid, the time and effort it took them to get the product, or the perceived emotional, social, and other risks they have faced or think they might face) [2,13,25]. This mental calculation, the product valuation, takes place at varying degrees of abstraction [12], depending on product involvement and consumer processing patterns [120,121] and results in “the balance between the benefits and sacrifices”, i.e., customer value [13]/customer perceived value [14]. So, in this stream of literature, value is positioned as “the consumer’s overall assessment of… what is and is not received” [13] vis-à-vis what was sacrificed [12,25,116]. Because such evaluations create cognitive strain [122,123,124], consumers often use value signals, such as brands [125], or quality or ethical claims like ‘naturalness’ or ‘greenness’ [2], as choice heuristics, even for choices as important as voting for parliament [126,127,128]. Nevertheless, the fact remains that value is generally considered to be what is left after considering the result in relation to the effort [129].

Both the benefits and sacrifices involved in marketing and purchasing have been organised [24,25] in a four-dimensional structure, which I here expand from its original application to services [24] and e-services [25] to all types of products. Each of the four dimensions of CPV answers one of the four fundamental questions:

• What (the technical dimension of what the customer gets out of the customer-product interaction);
• How (the functional dimension which comprises all experiences related to the interaction with the product and the seller);
• When (the temporal dimension which refers to the time when all functional interactions are possible and to the time during which they actually occur);
• Where (the spatial dimension which refers to the place in which the customer-product and buyer-seller interactions occur).

3.1.4. Epistemological Variations in Conceptualisations of Value Manifestations in the Context of Consumer Behaviour

The four-dimensional CPV conceptualisation brings the focus of the discussion of value in the marketing literature back to use value which is related to the achievement of customer objectives and experiences and away from the expected—or even imagined—utility which is embodied in exchange value and which, ultimately, might or might not support the fulfilment of customer purposes, including a feeling of being left better off [12]. Regardless of the mechanism of value perception, in the 20th and early 21st century marketing literature, value is primarily examined at the post-purchase phase of the consumer behaviour process [108]. Moreover, irrespective of the researchers’ chosen paradigm (that is, their fundamental ontological and epistemological assumptions and methodological approach), value is seen as an outcome; for positivists of an evaluation, for interpretivists of sensemaking of experiences, and for constructionists of a collaborative interaction process between buyers and sellers [116]. Both the positivist and interpretative streams of literature identify different types of manifestations of the post-purchase product benefits, namely [116]:

• Utilitarian (e.g., functional and practical, rational);
• Economic (e.g., monetary, efficiency, or convenience);
• Hedonic/aesthetic (e.g., sensory appeal, enjoyment, entertainment, or escapism);
• Social (e.g., values and status expression and signalling, or focal points for consumer-to-consumer interactions and group membership symbols);
• Emotional (e.g., self-gratification, brand–consumer values congruence, self-concept, or confidence).

Most of the social constructionist literature is also based on cost vs. benefit calculations, but manages to see past the dyadic abstraction of whimsical individual customer and bottom-line focused value creator and purveyor, in that it acknowledges the systemic nature of markets [116]. Within the social constructionist stream, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, there have appeared some conceptualisations which acknowledge a wider scope of social, ethical, and spiritual and environmental customer concerns, thus offering an escape from the amoral perspective which is the norm in the bulk of the marketing literature [10,11,27,28,31,130,131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139,140].

3.2. Value in the Context of Service-Dominant Logic

The embeddedness of value in the collective [28,130] and global spheres [11] is most likely to be found in the S-DL [10,131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139] and SL [10,27,131,132,140] streams of the marketing literature. These very closely related approaches challenged the product dominance of earlier marketing paradigms and acknowledged the importance of the integration of operand resources, the ones that are transformed by external action or being operated on, such as raw materials, and operant ones, which are the ones that execute the transformative operations on the operand resources, such as human resources [130,137,141,142]. Most importantly, they repositioned the role of the customer through conceptualising value as co-created.

3.2.1. Value Co-Creation

The S-DL literature introduced the concept of value co-creation (VCC) to the marketing discipline and firmly positioned value as “a cornerstone of firm–customer relationships.” [143], thus expanding earlier understandings [26] of customer influence on service delivery as relevant only to high-contact services and business-to-business (B2B) contexts in which customers set service delivery specifications. Co-creation, a concept which is “more general [than the earlier co-production, and one]… that encompasses all the specific theoretical and empirical occurrences in which companies and customers generate value through interaction… is [defined as] the joint, collaborative, concurrent, peer-like process of producing new value, both materially and symbolically” [144].

Companies, of course, have been practicing VCC for quite a while before the term was introduced into the marketing vernacular. Nike™, the American sportswear company, has been running the NikeID platform (https://www.nike.com/gb/w/nike-by-you-shoes-6ealhzy7ok (accessed on 13 January 2025)) for over 20 years. Users can pick one of almost 100 models of shoes, change the materials and colours of the shoe components, and add words to create a totally personalised product. Then they order their design online, and they receive it at home for about the same price the shoes sell in the shops. Lego™, the Danish toy company, elicits customer ideas for new products through a dedicated portal (https://beta.ideas.lego.com/ (accessed on 13 January 2025)). The ideas are presented to the community of Lego fans who vote for the ones they want to see on store shelves. The ones that get 10,000 votes are considered by the company for production as a real LEGO set. The Chinese tech company Xiaomi™ runs an annual designer competition in which users can turn their photos or artwork into themes using the platform’s (https://zhuti.designer.intl.xiaomi.com/theme-competition-2025/home (accessed on 13 January 2025)) design tools. Those selected by Xiaomi judges and those voted for by users get cash prizes and are used by the company on their devices. Finally, B2B firms have always been co-designing services, equipment, complete service, and equipment solutions with their customers and suppliers.

In the early works of this stream of the literature [134], the emphasis is on the subjective and ‘phenomenologically determined’ nature of use value as experienced by the customer within a given context. Indeed, the various definitions of use value which have been proposed or implied in the marketing literature post-S-DL focus on “the degree to which consumption leaves the consumer better or worse off” [3], or more broadly, “consumers’ perceptions of experience-based and context-specific outcomes associated with a product/service” [15], and an “alignment between consumers’… motivations and their service expectations” that is, a consumer-service provider’s joint and concurrent’ realisation of their objectives [143]. So, value is the outcome of a process in which the customer participates, but it is “not a processual experience in itself” [12].

VCC is firmly positioned within the realm of the Aristotelian subjective use value, as it is described as a consumer experience, and its evaluation [3], or the result of consumer involvement and engagement with the product through a “collaborative and continuous” process [143] of interactions that take place between buyers and sellers throughout their relationship [25] and not only during exchange episodes. These interactions can be mediated by technology and platform management organisations [12], digitalisation agencies [3,25,143], personalisation systems [15], and AI automation [143]. In the relevant literature, however, the process (co-creation as well as its polar opposite, co-destruction [110,111,145]) is more often than not examined in isolation from the outcome [146] despite the fact that it is generally acknowledged that VCC is “the realisation of benefit from the integration of resources through activities and interactions” [130].

To remedy the ambiguity, it has been proposed [146] that VCC is conceptualised as six-dimensional, comprising:

• Knowledge sharing (including idea generation, participation in the creative process, and resource investment in the process);
• Equity (comprising access to preference data and customer insights, transparency of objectives, and power sharing);
• Interaction (as in information flow and uninhibited expression of requirements as well as allowing customers to assume a proactive role);
• Experience (the core of use value, which encompasses the memorability of the experience, acknowledgement of the individuality of perception and evaluation, and room for experimentation);
• Personalization (which is close to the traditional customer centricity approach and partly overlaps with the philosophical description of use value);
• Relationship (which, further to the time and closeness dimensions, comprises interdependence and collaboration). The relationship dimension of the VCC is closely aligned with the fundamental conceptualisation of the International/Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) [147] literature stream which places emphasis on how the contents and format of exchange episodes between buyers and sellers form institutionalised relationships of mutual adaptation, which are characterised by their own atmosphere within a given environment comprising the social system and market structure and dynamics [147,148,149,150,151,152].

These six dimensions have been empirically confirmed to lead to customer satisfaction via VCC, which is the construct combining co-production (which comprises the knowledge, equity, and interaction dimensions) and use value (which comprises the experience, personalisation, and relationship dimensions) [146]. This approach contributes to overcoming the identified [131,144] debate in the literature regarding the relationship between co-creation and co-production. It shows that VCC is a broader term describing the “joint, collaborative, concurrent, peer-like process of producing new value, both materially and symbolically” [144], so it brings value in exchange, albeit indirectly, into the conceptualisation of value and contributes to an understanding of value which is more complete and coherent than earlier approaches. Nevertheless, it needs to be acknowledged here that, just as exchange value has been criticised for masking, if not obliterating, the value of labour, VCC has been criticised as a simulacrum of unpaid consumer labour [144]. This brings the role of the customer into focus.

3.2.2. The Role of the Customer

The role of the consumer is highlighted in the SL stream of the marketing literature [131,132,140,153] which “emphasize[s] that both goods and services are processed by customers as resources to create a service that renders value” [154] and sellers involve themselves in “their customers’ value-generating processes” [131]. During the interactions between buyers and sellers, the sellers become the value co-creators [131] by providing interaction opportunities (in the role of ‘value facilitators’) whilst customers utilise the sellers’ resources and their own skills to create the value they need (as ‘value creators’). Value, then, is the seller’s foundational input, but also the output experienced in the form of fulfilment by the customers through product use [131].

A more refined version of these ideas is offered by the ‘value in the experience’ conceptualisation, which extends “lived experiences of value… beyond… use to also include past and future experiences and… customers’ broader lifeworld contexts” [155]. This is a conceptualisation which links current with traditional services marketing and consumer behaviour thought [22,156,157,158] whilst de-objectifying value and re-shifting focus on the concurrent influence of the contextual and personal use-space, that is, the universe of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes and past, current, and projected, as well as expected and desired influences on the process of consumption signification. This line of thinking highlights that further to its being subjective, value is socially contextual [155] and meaning-laden [134].

3.3. A Synthesis of the Key Understandings of Value in the Main Streams of Marketing Literature

The conceptualisations of value across the main streams of marketing literature discussed above can be synthesised on the basis of their understandings regarding the nature of value (use, exchange, or experiential value), how it is determined, the emphasis they place on the outcome or the process of value generation and consumption, and the process by which value is generated and consumed. These understandings result in the determination of the role of the seller and the buyer, the role of marketing, the resources involved, and the focus on the firm or the totality of stakeholders acting as an ecosystem. The lines distinguishing the different streams are not always definite and clear, and their approaches often converge on some aspects and differ across others.

Table 2. Summary of the key understandings of value and the resulting mandates of the main streams of marketing literature and their most prominent sub-streams.

Marketing Literature Stream		Goods-Dominant Logic		Services Marketing		Service-Dominant Logic
		Traditional	Branding	Traditional	Experiential Marketing
Aspects of the conceptualisation of value	Nature of value	Use	Exchange	Use and exchange	Experiential	Co-created
	Value is determined	As the balance of benefits and sacrifices			As the balance of expectations and experiences	Phenomenologically
	Emphasis on	Outcome			Process
	Outcome	Tangible product	Perceptions	Service delivery	Customer experience	Integration
	Process	Transaction			Experience	Ongoing
	Role of seller	Embeds value in the product	Embeds value in the brand	Produces value during service delivery	Creates experiences	Provides interaction opportunities
	Role of buyer	Consumes value	Displays value	Experiences value		Determines value
	Role of marketing	Creates value	Crafts value significations	Manages service elements	Manages processes	Facilitates resource integration
	Key resources	Raw materials and technology	Communication	Skills, procedures, physical evidence, and technology		Operand and operant
	Focus	Firm				Ecosystem

summarises the key understandings of value and the resulting mandates of the main streams of marketing literature (G-DL, Services Marketing, and S-Dominant Logic) and their most prominent sub-streams.

3.4. Value as Meaning

Meaningfulness, of both the value proposition and the overall consumption experience, remains the prerequisite of the exchange required for value to materialise through product use. Idiosyncratic and personal as value might be, there are socially constructed boundaries within which it becomes objective. Various processes can determine these boundaries. Sacralisation and desacralisation [159], for example, are such processes that affect value perceptions for specific groups of people such as, for example, families, classmates, brand communities [160,161,162], ethnic groups, subcultures, or even whole societies. Collectors, for example, sacralise the objects they ‘rescue’ from those who do not understand their value [65]. This means that, absurdly priced as they might appear to non-collectors, the collected products carry a generally agreed-upon value (and subsequently price) amongst fellow collectors. Other boundary-setting practices that raise the value of an object beyond its exchange and use value in the eyes of a group of like-minded or related individuals, or a society, are sacralisation through [159]:

• Rituals, such as decorating, parties, and religious ceremonies, to signify making a house into one’s home;
• Secular pilgrimages like visiting places of historical interest or taking long, leisurely road trips;
• Quintessence, which could be because an otherwise mundane product is related to some valued experience (sort of like ‘as seen on TV’) or because they are perceived as possessing some “mystical totemic” quality or “affecting presence” [159];
• Gift giving;
• Inheritance;
• External sanction, such as having belonged to a person of exalted position or a glorious era, or being somehow connected to significant events or institutions of authority, such as museums.

“Thus, meaningfulness, exchange, and value are related but differing concepts” but, ultimately, they are ‘work processes’ which concurrently and jointly support the value consumers need to “cope with their life processes” [154]; a fundamentally Aristotelian approach. Thus, we return to the debate over the nature of value and its being unidimensional and cognitively perceived and evaluated, or multidimensional, cognitive-affective, comprising hedonic, social, and utilitarian value, and having a cumulative effect [163]. However, all the conceptualisations of value discussed here are devoid of the axiological stance inherent in the philosophy of value in which the construct is ultimately situated.

3.5. The Axiology of Customer-Perceived Value

Not all value is created equal. As most experiences, irrespective of their type, are neither memorable nor impactful, most VCC is mundane and insignificant. There are, however, instances when the value generated by an exchange and/or consumption episode has “a social dimension… that generates uplifting change for greater well-being among individuals and collectives” [4]. This value is called transformative value to distinguish it from “the everyday value that organizations offer to satisfy situational and domain-specific needs in a marketspace” which is known as habitual value [4]. What is of relevance to the axiological investigation of value in the context of marketing is the power of transformative value to significantly change people and their lives, and even the history and future of whole communities.

Moreover, the proliferation of products and the expansion of multimodal physical, digital, and phygital supply chains across space and time have brought about a dramatic increase in the number and severity of market externalities. These externalities can be anything, from environmental degradation to full-scale climate change, and from excessive wealth and power concentrations to erosion of social bonds and democratic institutions. The negative externalities of VCC processes, however, are not related to use value only. Exchange value comes hand-in-hand with afflictions such as affluenza, bingeing, propagation, and solidification of stereotypes, misinformation, and overborrowing. It has been argued that “ [e]ven people’s private lives are objects of externality-producing exchanges” [11]. They are paraded on social media and leave their marks on search engines, only to be turned into monetised data to be traded in opaque markets thus producing “externalities such as cyberbullying and addiction, digital fraud, disinformation, or excessive energy and water use” [11]. So, not all value is for the good. I here argue that it is an examination of value vis-à-vis values that has transformative potential and the power to deliver positive value and control negative externalities.

3.6. The Problem of Decoupling Value from Values

The literature reviewed so far is, in its fundamental logic, procedural as it focuses on:

• Inputs in the form of configurations of operand and operant resources [10];
• Mechanisms of determining the interactions between actors and system components;
• Outputs in the form of utilitarian, aesthetic, social, and emotional benefits [116], as well as experiences, evaluations, and pure emotions such as satisfaction, satiation, or enjoyment.

In summary, regardless of its being seen as created/destroyed or co-created/co-destroyed by customers and firms or by firms and customers, within or irrespective of the social system, value is seen in the literature as a largely values-neutral outcome of the buyer-seller interaction process. Value results from the interaction between a consumer and a product [18] which is of value only because someone wants to buy it [164]. However, the production, exchange, consumption, value co-creation, and disposal of any product create externalities which are borne by parties that neither want to buy it, nor are party to the decisions involved in its production and exchange.

Even though the S-DL literature is not concerned with the externalities, it nevertheless acknowledges that dyadic exchange relationships take place within a sub-system of the social system, the value-configuration space, which has its own social structures of signification, domination, and legitimation [165]. These structures influence the buyer-seller exchanges, but are also influenced by them [28]. This conceptualisation is a simplified version of the IMP one [147,148] and highlights the fact that “ [d]yadic relationships must always have three satisfied parties” [11]: the buyer, the seller, and the stakeholders. The idea that exchange relationships involve all stakeholders, and thus need to result in value for the buyer, the seller, and the community, can be traced back to the Omi merchants of Japan in the Edo period (1601 or 1603 to 1868) and the concept of Sampo Yoshi (三方よし) [97,166,167].

The current definition of marketing specifies that its purpose is to provide “value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” [20]. Acknowledging stakeholders is an advancement from earlier definitions, but still, “the current marketing thinking neglects to articulate or even ponder what marketing on a higher order level as a phenomenon might be … what is the meaning of marketing … beyond exchanging offerings that have value or satisfying needs.” [154]. So, not all value is valuable for everyone; also, the value of marketing seems to be rather limited.

The meaning of marketing must surely expand to the concern over externalities. It is obvious that ignoring the externalities borne by stakeholders is one of the manifestations of marketing amoralism [31]. Yet, it appears that the externalities borne by the ‘third party’ to dyadic marketing relationships are accepted by practicing marketers as well as most academics as inevitable. Even if externalities are taken into account when planning and executing marketing strategies, it is not enough of a contribution to the world.

It has been argued that to identify the higher-order purpose of marketing an axiology of value (“the preferential judgement”) built on values (“the relevant criteria on which such a summary judgement rests”) is needed [168]. This axiology can be based on the following typology of value in marketing [18]:

• Extrinsic vs. intrinsic value (that is, a utilitarian function along the lines of a means-ends relationship, such as buying a hammer to hang a picture on the wall vs. “consumption experience [which] is appreciated as an end in itself… as self-justifying, ludic, or autotelic” [18], as in listening to music);
• Self-oriented vs. other-oriented value (related to acting with a focus on the self vs. beyond the self on multiple levels, from a “micro level (family, friends, colleagues) to an intermediate level (community, country, world) to the most macro level (the Cosmos, Mother Nature, the Deity)” [18]);
• Active vs. reactive value, that is, value which results from “a physical or mental manipulation of some tangible or intangible object” [18] vs. value resulting from “apprehending, appreciating, admiring, or otherwise responding to some object” [18]).

The combination of these continua results in a 2X2X2 matrix, which, in each cell, gives a name to each type of value a customer derives, e.g., efficiency is a self-oriented, active value, whilst virtue is the intrinsic, other-oriented value [18]. For all the types of value that can be derived from exchange and consumption, the limit is set by values (e.g., fairness and compassion for the service personnel are the limit of efficiency).

It is beyond the scope of this entry to discuss values and morality in detail. However, it needs to be stressed that exchanges are delineated by explicit statements of the consensual but authoritative beliefs prevalent in the contractual system in which they take place. These beliefs, the values of a society, are expressed in the social norms and laws that frame marketing exchanges in a way that peacefully maintains the order and structure of the system [169]. Thus, values constrain the exchange episode participants’ value-seeking activities in a way that balances their well-being with that of the other stakeholders, including those Mackie describes as having “morally valid claims to consideration” [170] who might not actively participate in the social structure or might be unable to influence the behaviour of the other stakeholders (e.g., future generations, minorities and marginalised persons, flora and fauna, or the history, monuments, relics, and traditions of one’s community or those of others).

It is then clear that “ethics (including justice, virtue, and morality) is … [a] value that may be attained in the consumption experience” [168] alongside all other forms of value, not in the sense of altruism or some abstract adherence to deontolg(y/ies) but as ‘affirmative acts of goodness’ [168]. Moreover, in the current technological framework of unprecedented accumulation of scientific knowledge and mass access to massive data processing capacity, there is no excuse for reductionism [11]. We have the models and computing power to consider the effects of our actions on a multitude of stakeholders spread far and wide, below and above, and in the near and not-so-immediate future. Other disciplines in the general field of business studies have taken strides towards a systematic repositioning of their raison d’être and a refocus of their responsibility towards sustainability. For example, in recent years, research in sustainable manufacturing has proposed the introduction of product/service systems (PSSs) as a higher-level concept of VCC, which closes the loop of meeting firm economic objectives through creating an advantage based on incorporating environmental and social concerns in product and manufacturing process design [108]. In the context of marketing, value needs to be and—to some, yet rather small, extent—has been repositioned in the context of a greater good by being examined vis-à-vis values in the emerging marketing paradigm of V-DL.

3.7. Value-Dominant Logic

Survival International, a global movement for Indigenous peoples’ rights, describe their vision as “a world where Indigenous peoples are respected as contemporary societies and their human rights protected” and to achieve this they “stop loggers, miners, and oil companies from destroying Indigenous lands, lives and livelihoods… lobby governments to recognize Indigenous land rights… document and expose the atrocities committed against Indigenous people and take direct action to stop them” [171]. It is not only charities and human rights organisations whose reason to exist is to provide value to those who need it.

“[S]uccessful companies can make [the hard decisions] if they stick to a course that aligns with society’s needs and that delivers value both today and tomorrow. Increasingly, society is looking to business to help shape a better world. People rightly want businesses to share their common values. I welcome this, because it fits with what I have been working on my entire professional life: To seek equity and justice.

[Our] mission, one I believe [a pharmaceutical company] is here on this Earth for: to help relieve human suffering on a mass scale. To do that, we must take on projects that are long, risky, and expensive—and we have to do our part to help ensure that these treatments get to everyone who needs them” [172].

These excerpts from the speech Merck’s Ken Frazier made in acceptance of the Chief Executive’s 2021 CEO of the Year award are an example of an alternative marketing paradigm, Value-Dominant Logic (V-DL). V-DL places not only value but also fundamental values—such as integrity, compassion, virtue, and moderation [11]—at the heart of the socioeconomic ecosystem. Merck™, the oldest and one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, has, according to its own media, been guided for well over a century now by the philosophy of its “modern-day founder”, George W. Merck. He said, “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear” [172]. And, of course, Merck™ is not the only company built around values and value. “Dole™—a US corporation established in 1851—recently stated the Dole Promise, the synthesis of its commitment to nourish people around the world, reduce waste, decrease the environmental footprint, and grow value for all stakeholders” [173]. Patagonia™, the outdoor clothing company, supports grassroots activism and charities, reports on efforts to decrease its environmental footprint, supports circular economy efforts by undertaking the repair and resale of its products, and states:

“We made Earth our only shareholder… [i]nstead of ‘going public’, you could say we’re ‘going purpose’. Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth” [174].

In the context of V-DL, VCC is fundamental not only to human flourishing [129] but also to sustainable prosperity [11]. Going beyond the resource integration described by S-DL, V-DL proposes that every element of the ecosystem—persons, groups, organisations, and institutions—focuses on understanding the values, motivations, and outcomes of the other elements, proactively caring for their welfare and about their outcomes. This entails performing “conscious, inspired and imaginative… actions that increase the overall good” [129] and leads to the axiological definition of value as simply whatever is “good and worthy (or meritorious)” and places the focus of VCC on producing globally worthwhile outcomes [129].

It is obvious that the merits of actions and the worth of outcomes are dependent on the application of the tenets of systems of values, expressive of core beliefs and consistent with societal norms. Moreover, the meaning of both VCC actions and their outcomes emerges only when the derived value is examined in relation to a stated higher purpose [11,129,173] as in the examples of actual corporate practices discussed above. In essence, “[v]alues (what you stand for, integrity, honesty, fairness, etc.) create value. This holds for all actor-to-actor interactions” [173]. So, V-DL echoes the ancient philosophers, such as Protagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as contemporary ones working on virtue ethics, such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Elisabeth Anscombe, as it is premised on the assumption that people are fundamentally wise and virtuous [47,48,51,52,53,175,176,177,178,179]. V-DL is consistent with empirical neuroscience research results demonstrating that humans are hard-wired for caring [180], compassion [180,181], and admiration for “virtuous behaviour aimed at reducing the suffering of others” [181]. This means that value is inherently and necessarily:

• Peaceful (as conflict is reduced when egotism is curtailed by respect and care for others);
• Integrative (as it is based on “respect for the intrinsic value of all creation” [31]);
• Unifying (as it overcomes the “existential choice between a desire to have and a desire to be, desire being defined by absence or lack of being” [182]);
• Holistic (as it encompasses the full socioeconomic and natural ecosystem and involves concern for the conservation and efficient use of all its operant and operand resources);
• Sustainable in itself and contributing to sustainable prosperity (as it does not accept negative externalities for anyone, so it guides actants towards reducing them and ultimately eliminating them).

4. The Concept of Value in the Context of Sustainability

“The current approach to sustainability is not sustainable” because the dominant one, the ‘triple bottom line’ (3BL), visually puts social and environmental concerns on a par with profits [11] and is simply a plea to firms to make the small concession of measuring their social and environmental impact alongside their financial performance [183]. The 3BL first accepts that economic activity is simply a mechanism for the actants to generate profits for themselves by exploiting operant and operand resources to their full capacity, and then sets the limits of exploitation at just the point before the exhaustion of these resources. There is no concern for value for non-customers, suppliers, society, and the inanimate world. Just as we saw in the review of conceptualisations of value through the marketing literature, even customer value is linked to customer satisfaction, which increases the chances of repurchase and loyalty [7,12,13,22,24,143,153], which, in turn, lowers customer acquisition costs, increases customer life-time value (that is, total revenue from the customer for the firm) [116] and, ultimately, maximises profits.

Mainstream marketing is the fundamental profit-making tool as well as the purveyor of a widespread belief, based on a misreading of the Freudian concept of desire [118,184], that humans live to consume [31,185,186]. Commonly used maxims such as ‘the customer is king’ or descriptions of corporate culture as ‘customer-centric’ [185,187] as well as marketing literature streams such as S-DL [134,139], personalisation [15,188], and brand personality [189,190,191,192,193]—which has even been applied to objects as institutional as universities [194,195]—place the satisfaction of preferences and whims of individual customers at the heart of VCC and economic activity in general. This, however, leaves out important stakeholders; the ones who are indispensable to the VCC process, such as employees, the communities which host the organisation, and the environment from which the organisation takes energy and raw materials, and to which discarded products and production and marketing by-products return; that is, all those who bear the negative externalities of production.

Even if we accept the unsustainable 3BL approach to sustainability, it is obvious that the sustainability of the firm, the communities which host it, and those of humanity and the planet require that VCC involve all stakeholders in its design, creation, delivery, and enjoyment. Sustainability is an impossibility when the satisfaction of the ‘consumer’ (a flattening term which underplays the importance of people as citizens and moral agents [11]) is achieved by sacrificing the rights of the collective to clean air, for example, or when the fact that it is the employees with their labour, skills, and demeanour who co-create the value—neither the abstract ‘firm’ nor the imaginary ‘brand’ [173]—is overlooked.

5. Conclusions and Prospects

We live in unprecedentedly complex and globally challenging times to which marketers need to adapt, and fast, if they are to perform their role of facilitating VCC [196]. Recurrent crises have become the new normal, one that appears bleak for the rising numbers of children in regions under protracted conflict [197], threatening the physical, psychological, and social health and financial security of increasing numbers of people, even in the most advanced economies [198], and challenging for societies struggling under “greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation” [199]. Crises, of course, are not unique to the 21st century. They were, however, as rare as black swans up until 9/11. It took the risk management literature a decade to describe the unpredictable catastrophic events experienced by firms, markets, and economies as ‘black swans’ [200]. Since then, black swans of increasing frequency and intensity have been disrupting operations and compromising planning and decision-making [201]. For multinational corporations (MNCs), back swans amount to the “[a]pocalypse unleashed” [202]. What used to be “outlier events” [203] have, in the post-COVID-19 era, become all too common occurrences threatening the sustainability of businesses of all sizes, governments, and communities, as well as that of the planet [203]. Indeed, in January 2025, the scientists studying the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) nature of the sociopolitical and technoeconomic environment have set the doomsday clock to 89’ to midnight [204], from 90’ just a year ago [205]. The doomsday clock is ticking at the most frightening speed, and we are now are the closest ever to the total annihilation of civilization as we know it and life on the planet with it [204]. To describe the 2020s, a new word was needed [206]: permacrisis. It has been strongly argued [11] that the way out of the permacrisis is leading to sustainable prosperity.

Sustainable prosperity means a globally balanced economy providing a fair and equitable income distribution among and between societies, which are capable of providing to each and every one of their members according to their need and demand, and contributions according to their ability [11]. Key characteristics of a world organised for the achievement of sustainable prosperity are its organic development, dynamism, collaborative and peaceful orientation, efficiency, transparency, and facilitation of free, honest, and productive communication. So, as an end state in today’s terms, sustainable prosperity delivers globally improved living conditions, products that serve the users better without burdening others with negative externalities, and respect for human rights, the other inhabitants of the planet, the planet, and the universe (to which we are already exporting our debris and conflicts).

Sustainable prosperity accepts and celebrates evolution, change, and adaptation, and requires new forms of socioeconomic organisation. To achieve a collective aim of achieving sustainable prosperity, we need to rethink the meaning of value and decide on a generally accepted set of fundamental values. The UN has made strides with its charter and Sustainable Development Goals (the 17 UNSDGs), but unfortunately, progress is minimal (in only 17% of the SDGs), and the world seems to be stalled or regressing on most of them [207]. Most importantly, we need to set up procedures for equitable access to value and the institutions to safeguard them. Marketing has long been acknowledged as the main system for value creation and distribution, albeit a profit-making one, primarily egoistic and amoral. I propose that it is high time that marketing is redesigned so that virtuous marketers will be able to employ mindful marketing practices that ensure the optimal use of value-bearing and value-creating resources. It also needs to be integrated with currently complementary systems such as research and development (R&D) and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) so as to safeguard the maximisation and equitable distribution of value. This value will manifest as global individual and collective welfare, which is enjoyed in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to continue to generate and enjoy value.

In conclusion, I propose that we:

• Define value as the result of the combined, conscious, and creative actions of caring that promote sustainable prosperity;
• Conceptualise value as co-created by the interactions of various stakeholders;
• Acknowledge value as the connective tissue of a unique and indivisible socioeconomic-natural ecosystem equitably enjoyed by individuals, communities, organisations, institutions, markets, society, and the non-human inhabitants of the planet;
• Position VCC as the purpose of all economic activity and value as the centre of a purposeful business ecosystem;
• Redefine marketing as a mechanism for the mobilisation, integration, and mindful utilisation of operand and operant resources aimed at VCC;
• Allow humans in organisations, and organisations, to freely and consciously act as virtuous value enablers;
• Consider products as value-bearing entities aimed at supporting the pursuit of sustainable prosperity.