Purpose: This paper aims to offer fresh insight into attitudes towards casually used brands and the role of tie strength in the building of online non-brand-related network relationships amongst young consumers. Design/methodology/approach: Thirteen consumers aged between 18 and 24 years took part in in-depth interviews. The interviewees were matched on gender, age, occupation, residency and social media usage. Findings: Tie strength effects are evident in changes to brand attitudes, choice of social media platforms and in the casual use of brands to further consumer relationship building and identity creation goals. Research limitations/implications: This paper answers calls for greater understanding of the way in which network structure influences consumers’ online motivations and attitudes towards the brand. Practical implications: This paper explores the importance of managers viewing brands as embedded in broader social contexts and tailoring social media communications to those broader contexts. Originality/value: This paper is the first to combine tie strength with casual brand use to examine non-brand-related network effects on brand attitudes, growing and maintaining consumer relationships and building online identity.

Service scholars are recognising the complex, adapting, and dynamic nature of value creating service systems. There remains an opportunity to explore the dynamic properties of these multilevel systems and build explanations of how these complex systems change and stabilise providing the context for value creation. This paper builds on the continuing work and use of sociological theory in these efforts and argues for an alternative meta-theoretical approach and accompanying framework. Together this contribution provides a basis for building midrange theory to address the stabilising (morphostatic) and change inducing (morphogenetic) mechanisms in service ecosystems.

Purpose: This paper aims to develop impact value (IV), both theoretically and practically, to better account for the processes of value creation within complex service ecosystems. Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper connects the complex systems nature of service ecosystems and the complexity of issues of sustainability and well-being to the need for a conceptual and analytical extension of value within service ecosystems. Findings: This paper defines IV as enhancement or diminishment of the potential of stakeholders (beyond the service beneficiary), to transfer or transform resources in the future, based on direct and indirect involvement in the processes of value-in-exchange and value-in-use creation. Research limitations/implications: This paper provides an initial exploration of the theoretical and practical extension of value through the IV concept. Practical implications: Sustainable service ecosystems require actors to understand their role in the service process and account for the impact pathways of their value creation activities. This paper proposes a framework for developing sustainable strategies to account for IV. Originality/value: This research expands service research’s core concept of value by integrating the complex systems nature of service ecosystems, sustainability and well-being. IV provides a means to address the systemic impact pathways of service and value creation processes and bridge idiosyncratic value-in-use and broader system viability concepts.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce ecotones to the service literature as a conceptual extension of the service ecosystem (SE) framework. Design/methodology/approach: To synthesise the contribution, an illustrative empirical case study with research of nine organisations and their service systems is developed. Findings: Boundaries connect systems with their environment. Ecotone, a concept from natural ecosystems, provides a useful concept representing the boundary zones between adjacent systems, supporting emergent phenomena. The authors find that a service ecotone emerges through the interactions occurring at the intersections of relational, technological and institutional boundaries of two unique SEs. The case demonstrates ecotone edge effects – the unique landscape and diversity of actors and their roles – which play a role in the co-evolution of the separate SEs. Practical implications: The ecotone concept provides an understanding of SE boundaries, helping practitioners understand the complex environments they operate. Developing strategy in complex ecosystems requires a clear understanding of where the boundaries of dependence and interdependence lie. The ecotone concept helps practitioners to develop responsiveness and resilience to their environment and take advantage of resources that may be currently unrecognised. Originality/value: The authors introduce the ecotone concept and integrate it with service theory. This paper develops service ecotones for understanding the relationship between different systems that influence their functioning and development. Thus, ecotones suggest new avenues for understanding the diversity and roles of actors, and how new structural properties, resources and practices come to be through the tensions and interactions created in these complex boundaries of SEs.

Purpose: This paper aims to critically reflect on the growing systems orientation in marketing research and the approaches used to understand marketing systems. In response, the paper offers an integrative metatheory built on the ontic necessity and subsequently constitutive and causal efficacy of relations. Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper is built on a logic of critique, identifying the generative absences that produce problems in the frameworks in use and attempting to rectify these problems by offering an alternative meta-theoretical structure. This paper draws from critical realism, systems thinking and relational sociology. Findings: This paper advocates for an emergentist ontology for marketing systems built on the value of both substance and relation as co-principles of existence and the subsequent irreducible stratification derived from this. This position suggests the following propositions: the ontological premise of being is reliant on relations; the social world is constructed of stratified levels of organisation in which entities, their properties and powers emerge by virtue of these relations; these entities operate in complex and mutually modifying interrelations; stability and change is the result of this complex interplay of temporally/spatially stratified relations; and time and space are properties and potential powers of organisation. Originality/value: This paper considers a number of inconsistencies in current approaches to the study of marketing systems arguing these arise based on the absence of a view of relations that supports an effective theory of emergence. In response, the paper develops a set of ontological presuppositions regarding the nature of marketing systems and a subsequent set of epistemic conditions as an integrative metatheoretical position, through which these systems are better understood and analysed. The paper argues that these improve our ability to theorise about the multi-dimensionality of these systems.