Service development as practice: A rhetorical analysis of customer-related arguments in a service development project

Summary In this paper, in order to examine service development as practice, we draw on extensive ethnographic material covering an entire service development process. Through a rhetorical lens, we identify what types of customer-related arguments the project members use in order to drive the development process forward and confront these findings with service development literature. We find that customer orientation is rhetorically present mostly when it comes to what the team should do (i.e. appeals to ethos, expressed as identification with the customer but also as guilt). However, this type of rhetoric does not lead to action as prescribed by normative marketing literature - such as formal acquisition of and reliance on market research - due to more decisive arguments about resources.