KOREASCHOLAR

While the portion of manufacturing in the global economy has steadily decreased for past a few decades, that of the service sector has steadily increased. Manufacturing industry needs to have a more competitive strategy in a hyper-competitive environment. More recently, the concept of servitization based ICT has emerged, which is the strategy to increase effectiveness and efficiency of products or services. Servitization is defined as “the offer of integrated packages of products, services, support, self-service, and knowledge to add value to the company’s core business,” according to Vandemerwe and Rada (1988). Servitization is to add the new service function to the existing equipment or the hardware-oriented product in the aspect of a product. Productization is to complement the limitations such as intangibility, inseparability, perishability, variability in the element of service. The two concepts have been regarded as distinctive concepts. In recent years, however, these two ideas have been integrated into a single idea of servitization. Good-dominant logic is based on the idea that the product provides customers with the value which they desire. In the vein, manufacturing products is a productive activity that creates value and increases the wealth of the nation. Therefore, the service may be perceived as being less productive. Service-dominant logic, however, is not a value-in-exchange between a company and a customer but a value-in-use which means “the evaluation of the service experience (i.e., the individual judgment of the total of all the functional and emotional experience outcomes).” In service-dominant logic, service is shown as the means of innovation through systematic methodological procedures including organization, people, and information technology by knowledge. As the concept of customers became more and more important, the product needs to be integrated with service. The research on servitization is expanding to various similar concepts such as product-service system, service science, servicing, and so on. Most of the previous research is focused on service type classification at the strategic level or service at the enterprise level. Moreover, most of them are exploratory research. Despite the need for a deeper understanding of customer needs, the research on servitization in the light on customers is sparse. The purpose of this study is as follows: First, define the concept of servitization experience and develop a tool to measure the servitization experience. Second, in order to verify the construct validity of the servitization experience, we examined whether the servitization experience affects the outcome variables such as value, commitment, retention intention. In order to develop a measurement tool for the servitization experience, the following process was carried out. First, concept and questionnaire items were derived from related studies. Second, field expert interviews were conducted to verify questionnaire items. Third, interviews with academic experts were conducted to verify whether they could be used as actual questionnaire items. Fourth, the questionnaires were collected and the collected data were analyzed to verify the reliability and validity of the measurement tools. The sample for empirical analysis was college students in their 20s and 30s, and a total of 150 responded to the questionnaire. First, reliability analysis and validity analysis were conducted to refine the questionnaire items. Structural equation modeling was performed using the refined Servitization experience questionnaire and a model was constructed using the servitization experience as an exogenous variable, with value, commitment, and retention intention as endogenous variables. As a result of the empirical analysis, it is confirmed that the sub - factors of servitization experience consist of four types of integrated product and service, customized servitization, relational servitization and playful servitization. Reliability and validity were satisfied. Through this study, we can contribute to the empirical study of servitization by developing a scale to measure servitization experience. Thus, the purposes of this study are to identify the servitization experience factors that companies should consider in marketing strategy, to grasp the relationship between servitization and customer retention.

• Kyeongkook Jang(Changwon National University, South Korea)
• Joonheui Bae(Kyungpook National University, South Korea)
• Kyung Hoon Kim(Changwon National University, South Korea)