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This paper aims to identify key dimensions of brand value co-creation activities and empirically examine the impacts of different dimensions of brand value co-creation upon brand performance among Chinese industrial services firms.

Key dimensions of brand value co-creation activities are identified and a research framework is presented based on qualitative interviews with three industrial services firms. Then, the conceptual model and 14 research hypotheses addressing the impacts of different dimensions of brand value co-creation activities upon brand performance are tested by conducting a questionnaire survey among 258 pairs of Chinese B2B services providers and their client companies.

The research results show that: on the whole, integration of brand value chain and service-dominant logic (SDL) can lead to stronger theoretical explanation about the industrial services brand value and brand performance. In other words, value co-creation activities among multiple stakeholders can help customers perceive brand value in a favorable way and finally improve brand performance; branding process involves eight kinds of value co-creation activities on four interfaces between firm-employees, firm-customers, employees-customers, and firm-other stakeholders, indicating that the cultivation of industrial services brand needs a broader stakeholder perspective; value co-creation activities on the firm-employees interface is original driver of brand development by impacting brand value and brand performance via value co-creation on other interfaces.

This paper is the first kind of research that empirically explores the formation mechanism of industrial brand value from the perspective of SDL and also provides insightful implications for managers by pointing out that B2B service providers need to consider the interactive value co-creation behaviors in the social network constructed by different stakeholders in order to improve brand management performance.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the voice of the internal stakeholder in a way that emphasizes the internal stakeholder as an active force and decision maker in brand co-creation, as part of the new emerging paradigm of internal branding. The main aim is to understand the active role of volunteers in internal branding that is in the co-creation of value. A subsidiary aim is to understand why some volunteers engage deeply and seriously in a nonprofit organization while other volunteers seem less connected?

A conceptual framework incorporates several motivators to volunteer-led co-creation. A quantitative, co-variance-based structural equation modelling approach is used on survey data of a sample of 357 volunteers from 14 organizations in the Australian nonprofit sector.

The research findings contribute to the newly emerging internal branding literature focusing on the active co-creation role of internal stakeholders. The main drivers of volunteer co-creation are volunteer engagement, commitment, altruism, values-congruency and brand reputation. Different explanatory mechanisms/motivators apply to each type of volunteer-led co-creation. In a major initiative, the paper demonstrates linkages across the different types of co-creation, with a foundation/pivotal role for one particular type of co-creation, namely, enhanced client-based solutions.

The research is restricted to the public sector and further research is needed to test applicability to the private sector. Future studies could continue the initiative in the current study to explore the linkages across co-creation types.

Implications depend on which type of co-creation is targeted. Enhancing client-based solutions co-creation requires a very strong role for engaged volunteers. Innovation co-creation requires both engaged volunteers and a propensity to co-create by enhancing client-based solutions. Brand advocacy co-creation is driven by volunteer commitment, altruism and a propensity to co-create innovation.

A non-profit context ensures major social implications.

The study operationalizes the Saleem and Iglesias (2016) new internal branding paradigm framework by demonstrating that brands are built organically by interacting and engaging with internal stakeholders (volunteers in this instance), which, in turn, inter alia, motivates co-creation by such internal stakeholders.

This study aims to explore the role of local community in tourism co-creation. Despite the importance of internal stakeholders, there is a dearth of research on the process of place branding co-creation with the local community, considering their interconnections and influencing relationships.

An old and picturesque local market under a rebranding process was used as a case study. The research involved 10 interviews with market vendors to understand their views regarding place identity, their involvement in brand co-creation, their expectations about the process and the perceived results of such co-creation. Public information was also collected as secondary data to illustrate the rebranding process.

The vendor community had limited involvement in the market rebranding and felt they should have been more widely involved in the decisions as a group rather than individually. However, their satisfaction with the results of the rebranding led to the continuity of the sense of place and to the proud adoption of the new brand.

This study proposes greater integration of local communities as important internal stakeholders of place branding in addition to residents and suggests group meetings to involve the local community in the co-creation process.

This paper explores the context of a vendor community in a local market. This context has deserved little attention in the tourism literature. This study reflects the importance of local community to co-create place brands from a group perspective, taking into consideration. their roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships.

本研究探讨了地方社区在旅游共同创造中的作用。尽管内部利益相关者很重要, 但关于地方品牌与当地社区共同创造的过程, 考虑他们之间的相互联系和影响关系的研究却很缺乏。

一个古老的、风景如画的地方市场在品牌重塑的过程中被作为案例研究。研究涉及对市场商贩的10次访谈, 以了解他们对地方身份的看法, 他们对品牌共同创造的参与, 他们对这一过程的期望, 以及对这种共同创造结果的感知。此外, 还收集了公共信息作为二级数据来说明品牌重塑的过程。

供应商群体对市场品牌重塑的参与是有限的, 他们认为自己应该作为一个团体而不是个人更广泛地参与决策。然而, 他们对品牌重塑的结果感到满意, 这导致了地方感的延续和对新品牌的自豪采用。

本文探讨了一个地方市场中的供应商社区的背景。这一背景在旅游文献中几乎不值得关注。这项研究反映了当地社区从团体的角度共同创造地方品牌的重要性, 考虑到他们的角色、权利、责任和关系。

本研究提出, 除了居民之外, 当地社区也是地方品牌建设的重要内部利益相关者, 并建议召开小组会议, 让当地社区参与到共同创造的过程中。

Este estudio analiza el papel de la comunidad local en la cocreación turística. A pesar de la importancia de los grupos de interés internos, existe una carencia de investigaciones sobre el proceso de cocreación de la marca del lugar con la comunidad local, teniendo en cuenta sus interconexiones y relaciones de influencia.

Se utilizó como caso de estudio un antiguo y pintoresco mercado local en proceso de cambio de marca. La investigación incluyó 10 entrevistas con los vendedores del mercado para conocer su opinión sobre la identidad del lugar, su participación en la cocreación de la marca, sus expectativas sobre el proceso y los resultados percibidos de dicha cocreación. También se recogió información procedente de datos secundarios para ilustrar el proceso de cambio de marca.

La comunidad de vendedores tuvo una participación limitada en el cambio de marca del mercado y consideró que debería haber participado más ampliamente en las decisiones como grupo y no de forma individual. Sin embargo, su satisfacción con los resultados de la renovación de la marca condujo a la continuidad del sentido del lugar y a la adopción complacida de la nueva marca.

Este trabajo explora el contexto de una comunidad de vendedores en un mercado local. Este contexto ha recibido poca atención en la literatura turística. Este estudio refleja la importancia de la comunidad local para co-crear marcas de lugar desde una perspectiva de grupo, teniendo en cuenta sus roles, derechos, responsabilidades y relaciones.

Este estudio propone una mayor integración de las comunidades locales como importantes actores internos de la marca de lugar, además de los residentes, y sugiere la celebración de reuniones de grupo para implicar a la comunidad local en el proceso de cocreación.

In response to the rise of socially conscious consumers, brands have been taking a strategic approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR) to drive brand equity. Nevertheless, merely engaging in CSR is not enough to have a positive impact on the value consumers give to a brand. The success of a CSR program depends on its consumers’ perceived authenticity. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the perception of CSR authenticity, and consequently brand equity, can be enhanced by leveraging brand value co-creation.

The study uses a mixed-method approach to test its hypotheses. Study 1 collects survey data from a national representative sample in the USA, which is analyzed using structural equation modeling. Study 2 collects experimental data from a public university’s research pool, also in the USA, which is analyzed using ANOVA and mediation analysis.

This study demonstrates that when consumers believe that a brand is co-creative – i.e. consumers are allowed to participate in the creation of value – they will likely perceive the brand’s CSR program as more authentic, which in turn will positively affect brand equity.

The findings of this study offer implications for academics and brand managers interested on how to effectively leverage CSR for brand building. Specifically, it demonstrates that embracing CSR alone may not be sufficient to enhance brand equity and that brand managers should consider leveraging co-creation to strengthen perceptions of CSR authenticity.

This paper aims to further the authors’ understanding of brand communities, and their role in brand co-creation, through empirical and theoretical contributions derived from researching the marketing dynamics operating within a successful but atypical form of brand community, Fairtrade Towns (FTT).

The paper reflects a pragmatic application of Grounded Theory, which captured qualitative data from key “insiders”, with a particular emphasis on FTT steering group members and their role as “prosumers”. Data were gathered via ethnographic involvement within one town and semi-structured interviews with participants in others.

FTTs, as brand communities, demonstrate elements of co-creation that go beyond the dominant theories and models within the marketing literature. They operate in, and relate to, real places rather than the online environments that dominate the literature on this subject. Unusually, the interactions between brand marketers and consumers are not the primary source of co-creation in FTTs. Instead, factors usually identified as merely secondary providers of additional brand knowledge become key initiators and sources of co-creation and active “citizen marketer” engagement.

This study demonstrates how brand co-creation can operate in physical geographical communities in ways that are formal without being managed by conventional brand managers. It conceptualises FTTs as a nested and “glocalised” brand and demonstrates how steering group members facilitate the process of co-creation as prosumers. It empirically demonstrates how FTTs have evolved to become unusually complex brand communities in terms of the variety of stakeholders and the multiplicity of brands involved, and the governance of the localised brand co-creation process.

The purpose of this paper is to expand on existing co-creation knowledge in order to accurately conceptualize, operationalize and contextualize the customer brand co-creation behavior concept from a customer perspective.

A quantitative approach is adopted in this study, using structural equation modeling to verify the co-creation of brand value for those customers who co-create.

A new four-dimensional co-creation behavior concept is supported, highlighting the role of development, feedback, advocacy and helping, in the co-creation of brand value. Furthermore, a range of customer-level and brand-level antecedents are empirically verified.

The research takes a customer-centric view of co-creation and in doing so provides new insight into the effect on the co-creator. Additionally, the research offers an improved level of specificity in the co-creation domain by conceptualizing, operationalizing and contextualizing customer co-creation in a comprehensive research study.

The findings offer new insight to brand managers, identifying avenues for increasing customer participation in co-creation programs and critically highlighting that co-creation behavior has positive effects on the co-creator’s perception of brand value.

The customer-centric approach offers an original perspective from which to explore co-creation, demonstrating the positive potential of co-creation in brand management strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to find prior research work on brand co-creation and the role of different stakeholders in brand co-creation and to come up with a conceptual model that can be empirically validated.

A keyword approach has been used to find earlier published papers on co-creation and the role of different stakeholders in co-creation. The focus was more on brand co-creation. The inclusion criteria are empirical or conceptual research papers, books, conference papers, peer reviewed and published in English language journals. As the topic is encompassing various themes, a wide variety of academic resources were reviewed.

The history of literature brings forth the two major stakeholders consumers and organizations. The importance of third important stakeholder, i.e. suppliers has been mostly overlooked. However, previous studies show that appropriately managed supplier involvement can diminish product and brand development time and cost and it may provide access to newer technologies and better quality. Hence, for a successful brand co-creation one must not forget the importance of suppliers. Along with the motives and outcomes of brand co-creation from consumer and organization perspective this research aims to look into the supplier perspective of the brand co-creation framework.

This is the first academic literature review on brand co-creation from a triadic stakeholder perspective of consumers, organizations and suppliers. Also there is no comprehensive model that exists for brand co-creation looking at its input and its overall outcome. This review provides a bibliography of academic literature from 1959 to 2018 covering 150 journals.

This paper aims to investigate how brand identity is co-created, with a specific focus on how employees contributed to the process in a five-star hotel setting. The focus of this study is on understanding how two hotels planned and executed their brand identity strategy simultaneously, differentiating one from the other and how employees actively participated in this process.

A longitudinal case study approach was adopted, centred on building the identity of two luxury hotels owned by a single company in Seoul, Korea. Various organizational documents were collected and analyzed to understand the brand identity of the hotels and how brand co-creation has been implemented. In addition, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 42 employees to understand the brand co-creation process from their perspective.

The brand co-creation process of the hotels was conducted simultaneously and evolved over the following four phases, with employees’ roles varying in each phase, namely, establishing a clear brand identity strategy; designing and selecting sensory identity; aligning organizational identity; and delivering brand identity through external communication. Employees that participated in brand co-creation enhanced their brand knowledge, developed emotional bonds with the brand and were motivated to deliver the brand identity. Furthermore, those that immersed themselves in the new brand identities were able to enable positive guest perceptions towards the brand image, which consequently enhanced employees’ pride in their work.

This research advances the brand management literature in defining branding and brand identity elements, as well as emphasizing the importance of consistent branding. In addition, the current study expands the scope of internal branding, highlighting the process of brand co-creation and the role of employees as active participants. Moreover, it reveals that employees’ participation enhances not only their brand knowledge but also their emotional bonds with the brand. The proposed conceptual framework demonstrates the flow of branding elements, brand identity elements and the “infinite loop” of employee participation in brand co-creation.

The case study approach adopted here enables an in-depth investigation of employee participation in brand co-creation, including their different roles and activities in the process; a phenomenon that has not been adequately explored in previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to find supplier's role in brand co-creation. This paper also discusses the perspective of suppliers on the role and benefits of other stakeholders like consumers and the sponsoring organization in brand co-creation and to come up with some concepts and constructs related to these.

A qualitative approach has been used to identify supplier roles. Depth interviews were conducted on 15 selected suppliers from India already participated in brand co-creation. Grounded theory method was used to code and analyze the data and come up with important themes.

The grounded theory findings showed that suppliers need to have certain features like professionalism, willingness to invest in research and development (R&D) and flexible attitude in order to participate in brand co-creation. In turn, suppliers are benefited from participating in such an event as it improves their performance, growth and offerings. The depth interview findings also showed the reasons for successful and failed brand co-creation and the informant suppliers' view on the roles consumers and organization play in band co-creation and the benefits they receive.

This is one of the first academic studies of identifying supplier's role in brand co-creation looking beyond consumers and organization. There is no qualitative and quantitative study that was conducted to find out supplier's role. The paper conceptualizes important concepts related to supplier's features, roles and benefits in brand co-creation.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the power of social media networks, namely Instagram, in building brand communities and co-creating value for brands. By analysing the 2015 campaign #withoutshoes by TOMS, the authors intend to demonstrate how the value creation process can be extended to involve all stakeholders and raise the effectiveness of a brand’s communication campaign.

A qualitative approach was taken to enable an understanding of online consumer behaviour. A series of qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with retail and marketing professionals from the TOMS brand to explore brand strategy. The TOMS Instagram account was analysed for a specific marketing communications event and summative content analysis was applied to the brand’s Instagram profile in order to allow for an in-depth exploration of the co-creation process. Triangulation was used for the multiple sources of evidence in order to build the study and to establish the convergence of data results, to diminish bias and to increase accuracy of the research data (Saunders et al., 2009).

Through a detailed overview of the campaign developed by TOMS, this paper explores how TOMS fosters the formation of consumer-brand-relationships as well as maps out the advantages of value co-creation. The research findings support the literature on co-creation, which argues that the way to achieve innovation and value creation in the changing and challenging marketing landscape is through co-creation. This study adds to the findings that co-creation strategies are a privileged manner of nurturing customer relationships and of lowering costs for marketing and research and development (Sawhney et al., 2005; Prandelli et al., 2006).

There are a relatively limited number of studies focusing on the Instagram platform, and of those carried out thus far most concentrate on how the platform interprets cultural issues, rather than how it can be used effectively as a marketing strategy and how it can leverage user’s preferences. Also, not a lot of studies have focused on the relationship between value co-creation and its relevance and impact on brands through engagement processes and the role of experience in brand building. Brand value co-creation through human experiences can provide considerable implications for brand management (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a) as well as be a key component in the building process of customer experiences. This study suggests new approaches to getting useful insights about how brands can use social media to further engage with their target audience though an integrative framework of brand value co-creation with theoretical underpinning.