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Anchored in the theories of brand gestalt and stakeholder perspectives, this study aims to undertake a comprehensive examination of the brand gestalt concept, emphasizing its multidimensional nature and the process of co-creation.

Focused within the context of the Wonderful Indonesia brand, the research draws upon a rich qualitative data set derived from in-depth interviews conducted with 18 international tourists, supplemented by netnography (or internet ethnography) of websites, social media and online articles related to Wonderful Indonesia. Using grounded theory methodology, the qualitative data undergo rigorous analysis to identify emergent themes and patterns.

The research elucidates the four dimensions (4S) comprising brand gestalt: storyscapes, sensescapes, servicescapes and stakeholderscapes. Each dimension is further delineated into essential categories, providing a comprehensive understanding of brand gestalt. This study highlights the collaborative nature of brand gestalt, emphasizing the involvement of multiple stakeholders in shaping the brand's identity and perception. Consumer perceptions of co-creation are identified as significant contributors to brand gestalt, enhancing the brand's value proposition.

Destination management and practitioners can use the insights from the research to refine their brand management and marketing strategies by leveraging the dimensions of brand gestalt. Recognizing the collaborative construct of brand gestalt can guide businesses in fostering meaningful relationships with stakeholders and aligning branding efforts with collective visions. Understanding the role of consumer co-creation in brand development can inform strategies aimed at enhancing brand equity and fostering consumer loyalty.

This study extends existing literature on brand gestalt by providing a comprehensive examination of its four dimensions and essential categories. By emphasizing the collaborative nature of brand gestalt, this study contributes to advancing the understanding of brand co-creation paradigms. The identification of consumer perceptions of co-creation as a significant factor in brand gestalt adds novel insights to the literature, offering valuable implications for brand management and marketing strategies.

Co-creating with value network partners (VNPs) in the tourism industry has become essential for delivering improved service quality and enhancing consumer experience. This research examines the impact of value co-creation on the satisfaction of VNPs. Further, the study examines the moderating effects of socio-demographic factors on the relation between co-creation and VNP satisfaction.

The study collected data from VNPs engaged in tourism-related activities (N = 392). It analysed the data through structural equation modelling using SPSS 20 and AMOS 21. The study used the stimulus-organism-response framework to understand VNP's perceptions regarding co-creation.

The results indicate a significant relationship between the value processes and networks, service offerings, conversations and dialogues and value proposition in relation to co-creation. Additionally, the study identifies the significance of age, education level, job experience and job nature. The findings of the study can enable tourism managers to formulate effective co-creation strategies.

The insights from the study enable tourism managers to devise co-creation strategies that nurture collaboration with VNPs. Managers can gain insights into the antecedents of the co-creation and the role of demographic factors in shaping strategies.

The study's findings have the potential to shape co-creation policies in the tourism and hospitality industry. Network partners and tourism companies can leverage insights from the study to develop and refine their co-creation policies. By bridging the gaps in the existing literature on value co-creation with network partners, the study contributes significantly to tourism and hospitality literature.

The idea of value co-creation involves the benefit actors gain from integrating resources through activities and interactions within a service network, with the environment enabling high-quality collaboration. This paradigm highlights customers’ ability to co-create value with service providers and other customers. This idea is gaining traction in health care. These days, patients are no longer passive recipients of health-care services; rather they have started taking proactive roles in their self-health management. This study aims to understand the phenomenon of value co-creation among patients within online health communities (OHCs).

A systematic literature review of papers published from 2003 to 2024 in Web of Science-indexed journals was conducted. The review highlights theories, contexts, characteristics and methodologies in this area, synthesizing insights from previous research and presenting a future research agenda for underexplored and unexplored contexts using emerging theoretical perspectives and analytical methodologies.

The review illuminates theoretical and empirical studies on value co-creation among patients in OHCs. Previous research shows that value co-creation among patients leads to cognitive, affective and physical benefits such as reduced anxiety and stress, increased assurance and self-confidence, improved quality of life, enhanced patient empowerment, acceptance of disease and treatment effectiveness and a sense of self-worth and well-being.

This review synthesizes insights from previous works and outlines a research agenda for future studies in underexplored and unexplored contexts using new theoretical perspectives and methodologies. Considering the role social media plays in an individual’s life, this work will help in deep diving into the role of such online communities in the health-care sector.

Co-creation of services (CCOS) is a collaborative strategy that emphasises customer involvement and their expertise to increase the value of the service experience. In the service ecosystem, artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role in value co-creation. Therefore, this study is undertaken to empirically uncover how AI can empower CCOS.

The source data were collected from 305 service provider respondents and quantitative methodology was applied for data analysis.

New service development augmented with AI provides tangible value to service providers while also providing intangible value to supportive customers. With AI, service providers adapt to new innovations and enrich additional information, which eventually outperforms human-created services.

AI adoption for CCOS empowerment in service businesses brings “service-market fit”, which represents the significant benefits wherein customers contribute to creativity, intuition, and contextual awareness of services, and AI contributes to large-scale service-related analysis by handling volumes of data, service personalisation, and more time to focus on challenging problems of the market.

This study presents theoretical concepts on AI-empowered CCOS, AI technological innovativeness, customer participation in human-AI interaction, AI-powered customer expertise, and perceived benefits in CCOS, and subsequently discusses the CCOS empowerment framework. Then, it proposes a novel conceptual model based on the theoretical concepts and empirically measures and validates the intention to adopt AI for CCOS empowerment. Overall, the study contributes to novel insight on empowering service co-creation with AI.

Online health communities (OHCs) have emerged on the Internet, substantially changing the conventional healthcare delivery model. Despite this emergence, the lack of patient participation and contribution always limits the success and sustainability of OHCs. Previous studies have disclosed that patients’ value co-creation behavior (VCB) helps organizations sustain OHCs. However, how the recent surge in artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as social support chatbots (SSCs), drives patients’ VCB is still unknown. Therefore, this study examines the complex mechanism behind patients’ VCB to establish sustainable OHCs.

Using value co-creation and social support theories, the author develops a moderated mediation model and analyzes survey data from 338 respondents using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and artificial neural network (ANN) methods.

Results demonstrate that perceived social support (PSS) from SSCs positively affects VCB directly and indirectly via patient learning (PL). This indirect effect is stronger when patient ability/readiness (PAR) is high. ANN findings highlight the model’s robustness and the significant role of PAR in VCB.

This study’s integrated framework offers unique insights into key drivers of patients’ VCB in OHCs. The findings indicate that PSS from SSCs enhances PL and VCB, with PAR influencing the strength of these relationships. Understanding these dynamics can inform user-centric interventions to promote effective learning and collaboration in OHCs.

As a high-reward strategy to differentiate social platforms, value co-creation is increasingly becoming a tool to enhance customers' social attachment. However, there is still a lack of academic understanding of the value co-creation that enables users to build social attachment with social platforms. To address this challenge, we develop and then examine a theoretical model grounded in value co-creation theory considering the relationship between value co-creation and social attachment, and also explore the mediating effect of user experience and the moderating effect of self-disclosure.

This study takes representative social platform users as the research object, chooses Questionnaire Star as the platform for questionnaire distribution and collection and collects 531 eligible data through the snowball sampling questionnaire method. And then, MPLUS7.4 is used to analyze the data and thus examine our proposed theoretical model.

The results of structural equation modeling analysis suggest that two dimensions of value co-creation (i.e. initiated value co-creation and spontaneous value co-creation) affect social attachment not only directly but also indirectly (i.e. the mediating role of user experience) and that self-disclosure moderates the impact of value co-creation affecting social attachment.

This study verifies the impact of different dimensions of value co-creation toward social platforms on social attachment, showing that value co-creation plays an important role in developing users' social attachment and provides practical implications for promoting the sustainable development of social platforms and building users' psychological well-being.

Researchers, with the widespread acceptance of Web-based technologies by companies, have recently discovered a new type of social capital through these mass communication tools, but there is still limited knowledge about its formation. Therefore, this study specifically aims to conceptualize and validate brand social capital (BSC) by analyzing the role of the online brand community’s social media capital (OBCSC).

Research data was collected using a questionnaire with 39 closed-ended questions. Participants, among the 220 questionnaires distributed, only returned 140 acceptable questionnaires, indicating a response rate of 64%. The statistical population of the study included managers and employees of e-commerce companies active in social media in the field of B2C who introduce and sell their products and services on various types of social networking websites. This study performed data analysis using structural equation modeling with partial least squares.

The results showed that OBCSC has a positive and significant effect on the integration of brand knowledge, branding co-creation and sense of belonging to the brand community, and in addition, using the mediating role of these three variables, it also has a positive effect on BSC. This study rejects only hypothesis 8 among all the hypotheses formulated, which shows that the sense of belonging to the brand community has no significant effect on branding co-creation.

By conceptualizing a new phenomenon called BSC and how its conversion mechanism is, this research defines a specific and formulated path to better identify the results of the organizational use of social media. In addition, it significantly contributes to increasing managers’ understanding of the importance of online brand community activities in internalizing customer brand knowledge within the company and turning it into wealth.

Future service interactions are anticipated to use humanoid robots in a society that is shifting to a digitalized era. Currently, it is evident that many businesses are replacing service interactions with self-service technologies (SSTs). This movement creates substantial societal changes that researchers have not paid sufficient attention to comprehend. In this setting, the purpose of this study is to examine the social drivers that influence customer mobility toward co-creating value via SSTs. The study also seeks to discover variations in customers' willingness and capacity to adopt SSTs.

To fulfill the research aims, a qualitative technique was adopted, with semistructured interviews conducted with 25 SST users from varied demographic backgrounds. To recruit individuals for the study, a nonprobabilistic purposeful sampling technique was adopted, with the goal of employing information-rich instances. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis.

The study identified eight social drivers that are important in the customer transition toward co-creating value with SSTs. According to the study, SSTs are characterized as a social trend in which adoption is accepted (social norm) and modifies social connections in a new direction. Using SSTs has evolved into a socializing tool that gives people social acknowledgment. Some people see SSTs as social pressure, putting them at a disadvantage if they do not adopt. People, on the other hand, acquire sufficient social support and independence to use SSTs. Customers were categorized into four groups depending on their willingness and ability to embrace SSTs: trendsetters, dreamers, old-fashioned and stragglers.

In practice, service providers can use this knowledge to successfully promote their SSTs and create enhanced client experiences through technological interfaces.

The study adds new knowledge by identifying social determinants in customer shifts toward SSTs, a phenomenon that has not been studied previously, and it adds to marketing theory by proposing a typology to group customers based on their ability and willingness to embrace SSTs.

This paper identifies the value of Indigenous processes in developing a reciprocal working relationship between a Pasifika grass roots community organisation, Pasifika Church and an Australian university. The focus is on the capacity of Indigenous methodologies to authentically attain equity, diversity and inclusion, during the development of stakeholder partnerships, particularly when there are power and resource imbalances between parties.

This paper is about the process of how Pasifika methodologies, namely talanoa, e-talanoa and teu le va, were used to create positive reciprocal relationships in a culturally grounded manner. The outcome was an agreement of the three stakeholders, the Pasifika Church, the Pasifika organisation and a tertiary institute to work together on a community educational and training project.

The agreement by all parties to adopt Indigenous methodologies from inception enabled the process to be community-led in a culturally safe manner. Critically, these cultural processes established a foundation of trust, expanding possibilities for shared work and projects. For migrant communities, the advocacy and employment of cultural methodologies can empower them through negotiations to maintain their sovereignty over their Indigenous knowledge and priorities. Similarly, it is important for universities and mainstream organisations not only to acknowledge power imbalances and to support community-led priorities but also to cede power around processes of negotiation and discussion.

This is an experience of four organisations working together. It is uncertain whether the same outcome could be attained with other organisations, personalities and cultural groups.

The same principles may be harnessed for other migrant communities, allowing for their cultural practices to inform the ways in which stakeholders work together as opposed to the often-dominant euro-centric practices of the West. It is a deliberate effort that privileges Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing.

Migrant communities that perhaps may be subject to the more Western dominant environment are empowered to use their cultural frameworks to create an equal ground with government, tertiary and not-for-profit stakeholders.

This article is one of the first in Australia to document how talanoa, e-talanoa and teu le va were used to develop a working partnership in a culturally grounded manner to uphold the sovereignty of grassroots Indigenous organisations. This strengthens relationships between migrant communities and mainstream organisations. It outlines Pasifika protocols and successful use of equitable decision-making, led by a grassroots community organisation, a Pasifika Church, whilst liaising with a multi-campus university.

The purpose of this transformative service research (TSR) is to apply, innovate on and extend the understanding of service-dominant logic (SDL) perspectives, sustainable service ecosystem design ideas, transformative value and meeting sustainable development goals (SDGs). This study explores these through volunteers’ lived experiences and their perceived health and well-being outcomes in the context of botanic gardens as health-care service settings.

A total of 3 UK botanic gardens and 84 volunteers between 22 and 87 years of age participated in this qualitative study. Volunteering stories were collected through emails, telephone exchanges, online and in-person interviews, free-flowing discussion and field observations. These were coded and analysed by using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, NVivo 14 Plus and Leximancer. Thematic analysis facilitated the mapping of well-being outcomes highlighting transformative value against existing health and well-being indices.

Insights extend knowledge into SDL, TSR and transformative value experienced by volunteers across three UK botanic garden service ecosystems. Environmental, organisational and personal factors, and physical, mental and social health outcomes are presented to emphasise transformative value experienced, especially in retiree volunteers. Theoretical contribution is in the form of empirical evidence to support and extend insights about transformative value and more so, significant epistemological change and meeting SDGs in botanic gardens. Results add to contemporary TSR on health-care-related well-being outcomes and ideas regarding sustainable service ecosystem design.

It is recommended that service research be extended across other botanic gardens, as well as other novel underexplored contexts for comparative studies of transformative value. Continued development and consideration of service designs as ongoing efforts to redefine and reimagine services marketing innovation for botanic gardens are recommended. Botanic gardens are complex service ecosystems worthy of rigorous service research to capture and measure the impact and outcome of ongoing work of the sector in advancing SDGs and having a transformative effect on individual and societal health and well-being.

This study highlights opportunities for greater area-based, coordinated, collaborative, multi-stakeholder services marketing partnerships for strategic sustainable service ecosystem design for the botanic gardens and health-care sectors. These sectors can make better use of service research and marketing to further innovate and co-develop health and well-being strategies, campaigns and opportunities to develop services to transform and influence positive health and well-being outcomes for people. Results reveal greater opportunities for collaborative partnership and services marketing’s role and practice for the ongoing vitality and viability of botanic gardens. Joint efforts would enable innovation on sustainable service ecosystem design, advancing SDGs and improving life on planet Earth.

Transformative value linked to newfound life experiences and meaning to life after retiring with a range of factors, and health and well-being outcomes were prominent. Social connections to the wider community were present, revealing links to a range of people who may not have traditionally had contact with botanic garden heritage and their strategic efforts. Therefore, it is services marketing opportunities for botanic gardens that hold one key to greater transformative value, sustainability and greater influence and impact on individual and societal health and well-being.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first TSR on botanic gardens as health-care service settings, resulting in a conceptual framework on transformative value and well-being outcomes in meeting SDGs. It extends insights on SDL, sustainable service ecosystem design and roles of marketing for the common good. Botanic gardens are unique research institutes, highly acclaimed for research, conservation, education and displays of special botanical collections, as well as providing health care, among other impactful SDG opportunities. This can be made more explicit through ecosystemic thinking, service research and integrated services marketing of botanic garden’ roles and contributions worldwide.