Service Dominant Logic for Wine E-Commerce Sites - Evidence from Italy

This study pursues a methodological finality (verifying if and how it is possible to apply the 11 Foundational Premises of Service Dominant Logic to wine e-commerce sites- WECS), and answer an investigation objective («Are the most important Italian wineries’ websites of e-commerce already oriented to value co-creation according to SDL?», as research question). Thus, the finality of the study has a theoretical nature (so to elaborate an explanatory/interpretative model), while the objective (applied to a specific field) has an empirical nature. The main outcome of this study is the theoretical model, which can be used as a framework for the application of SDL to WECS. The subsequent evidence is the delay of the most important Italian WECS as concerns the application of these principles (and, in truth, about e-commerce in general). As scientific implications, the research suggests to center further studies even more on the application of SDL to WECS, making huge use of relational marketing, educational marketing, and experiential marketing. In fact, wine choice, purchase, and consumption are activities that are influenced very much by a cultural approach, and value co-creation on WECS seems to be focused on this perspective mainly. Asmanagerial implications, the model can work as a checklist for the evaluation of the orientation to value co-creation (according to SDL) for WECS. For Italian wineries’ managers, furthermore, the study has highlighted the current gap of their WECS as regards value co-creation, which can be developed mainly by using social media, whose current use by the same wineries seems instead very interesting.