"Servicizing" is a transaction through which value is provided by a combination of products and services in which the satisfaction of customer needs is achieved either by selling the function of the product rather than the product itself, or by increasing the service component of a product offer.

One industry that learned the lesson the hard way is IT industry, especially software companies who were caught sleeping while cloud development was happing around them. Those that were caught off guard are now in painful challenge of deciding how to cope with two opposite ways. Investing in future (cloud) while surviving today - bringing product updates to existing client base that already has software installed on premise and expects updates of functionalities, service etc. You will ask how does that relate to Brands (traditionally products). Your Brand Products can't be turned into services. Perhaps you are right, but let me point this out to you.

Brands are not even a part of the decision making and they have been permanently deleted from a customer journey and future decision making process

Uber's impact has been just that - "Servicizing" of a concept of owning a car. In this, reconfigured context, utility has been increased so high, and value proposition reconfigured, that we don't really know and/care which Car Brand comes to pick us up. Interestingly enough, Brands are not even a part of the decision making and has been permanently deleted from a customer journey and future decision making process. After knowing all those investments gone into building brand equity that should sound really scary.

Let's look at another example.

Outcome of 'Servicizing' besides of different consumption pattern, and as we saw from Uber case, is also change in the economics of payments. Namely, rise of service enabled by digital, also meant change of payment from one lump sum payment to subscription models. Good example of that is 'One-Dollar Shave Club' which has recently has been acquired by Unilever. Change of from payment per piece to per month. Unilever hasn't bought this company for no reason. I believe that this acquisition will have strategic impact as it will enable corporate learning into brand subscription models. One can make an educated guess that soon we will see other Unilever brands experiment with this model. Retainment, loyalty programs, data, higher consumer switching costs between brands are all in this interesting interplay.