Transition Strategies between Product Space and Service Time: User Assets, Search Characteristics, and Co-production

When services and products face each other as substitutes-in-use, market transformation can arise out of transitions from product to service use as well as from transitions from service to product use. Sometimes, this outcome results from the user acting as a co-producer, a process perhaps more common in time-intensive service markets than in space-intensive product markets. Other mechanisms that can facilitate such transitions involve complementary user assets and complementary assortment creation. In the automotive oil change industry, complementary user assets and experience characteristics can enable such transitions and possibly involve service co-production. In the home improvement and maintenance industry, transitions involving service co-production with users are less plausible than complementary assortment creation by retailers that allows users to internally produce substitutes for full-service provision. In general, neither a time-intensive service-dominant market nor a space-intensive product-dominant market is uniquely likely to prevail for any given use for which transitional goods compete.