ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to help marketers to think beyond the product by embracing the solutions mind-set. It presents a comprehensive roadmap for defining, designing, and delivering solutions. With the emerging service-dominant logic of marketing, the author propose that marketers need to focus on design and marketing of customer solutions, offerings that integrate goods and services to provide customized outcomes for specific customers. Marketing strategies focus on product innovation, product line extensions and new product features. A front-back organization design allows firms to create repeatable solutions by productizing one-off solutions developed by the front end. This allows the firm to create a 'solutions factory' that is provided with one-off solutions as 'raw material' that the back-end units can convert into repeatable solutions, the 'finished goods' for the solutions factory. The version of customer value-based pricing is gain-sharing. Gain-sharing is a pricing approach where the payments to the solution provider are based on the level of business value realized by the client.
