Search results

This paper aims to examine the origins of value co-creation (VCC) knowledge streams, vis-a-vis their progression over the past 18 years. The study explores how knowledge of this discipline emerged across the tripartite strategic paradigms of business transformation.

Co-citation analysis (CCA) and co-word analysis (CWA) are used as bibliometric techniques, for which, a group of articles is retrieved using Scopus’s usual keyword-based search. The initial collection consists of 3,431 research articles published in business and management publications. By explaining the article clusters generated through CCA and keyword connections generated through CWA, the findings outline the origins and development of VCC research. A CWA-based chronological study adds further insights to the development of VCC research themes.

The results depict that VCC research has grown multifold in the past 18 years, whereby it has shifted its attention from a dyadic interaction approach to a multistakeholder ecosystem-based approach detailing the phenomenological instances of resource integration and institutional processes. Notably, extant research in this field has grown at a much faster rate since 2008. In fact, a stronger concentration of research emerged in the experience domain, particularly in terms of hedonic services. Development of engagement platforms has been driven by research into technologies such as IoT and artificial intelligence.

The theoretical framework of the VCC paradigm is used to describe the aggregation of co-creation research around the three strategic pillars. This framework is useful for business strategy and to track VCC research over time.

This work identifies the practices and strategies of VCC at three different levels: capacity, platform and experience. The study offers insights into a variety of co-creation practices at their respective levels, incorporating micro-level dyadic interactions and macro-level processes in a service ecosystem.

This study uses different bibliometric methodologies to investigate the development of this scientific field over time. “Document co-citation” analysis, a more preferred bibliometric technique under CCA, is used to construct the cluster of theoretical cores of this area. The results are classified under the strategic framework of the co-creation paradigm (Ramaswamy and Ozcan, 2014).

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.

Customer engagement (customers’ behavioral manifestations going beyond customer-firm purchase transactions) has been regarded as strategic imperatives for generating enhanced corporate performance. The plethora of new media has provided customers with different options to interact with firms and other customers. However, the primacy of value-laden interactive customer relationships and value co-creation raises challenges for firms and customers, especially in the context of broader business ecosystems such as brand partnership for extending value co-creation. This study aims to explore how customer engagement with well-designed choreograph of various new media’s channels can increase the value co-creation extent in the context of broader business ecosystems, resulting in higher levels service offerings, experiences and innovation.

This exploratory study presents a new framework of customer engagement that holistically integrates the elements of multiple new media and broader business ecosystem, stimulating a virtuous circle of realizing customer engagement toward superior results or innovations. The framework considers new media’s different information service and technologies (e.g. search engine, social recommender, social media) that can be properly choreographed to achieve a virtuous customer engagement circle.

This paper uses an exemplar framework's instantiation – an information technology enabled engagement platform (called iEngagement) – that can demonstrate how to empower the central companies together with their eco-stakeholders to holistically perform customer engagement utilizing new media toward fruitful customer engagement.

This exploratory study is among the first that addresses the theory and practice of customer engagement within multiple new media and broader business ecosystem. This paper presents a customer engagement framework and an exemplified engagement platform that holistically integrate the elements of multiple new media and broader business ecosystem, for stimulating a virtuous circle of realizing customer engagement toward superior results or innovations.

This paper aims to conceptualise and characterise brand systems and outline propositions and research avenues to advance the systems’ view of branding.

A conceptual synthesis approach is adopted to integrate the extant branding research perspectives. The conceptual framework is grounded in the theoretical foundation of marketing systems theory.

The conceptual framework delineates brand inputs, throughputs, outcomes and feedback effects within a brand system. It configures the complexity and dynamics of brand value formation among brand actors within the branding environment.

This paper contributes to systems thinking in branding and brand value co-creation research. It extends marketing systems theory into the branding context and provides research directions for exploring the structural and functional configurations, cause–consequence processes and outcome concerns of brand value formation.

This conceptual framework informs brand development, management and regulation at a macro level. Managers can apply the brand system concept to identify and manage conflicting expectations of brand actors and alleviate adverse brand outcomes such as negative brand externalities, enhancing overall brand system health and societal value.

This research expands the scope of brand actor agency and identifies the likelihood of disproportionate brand outcomes. It provides methodological guidelines for analysis and intervention in brand systems.

A brand community consists of relationships between a brand and consumers; community members’ identification with the brand community is a central characteristic of the community. This study aims to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate how and why such identification-based relationships yield firm- and member-level benefits to participants in the brand community.

This cross-sectional study analyzes data collected through a questionnaire survey of members from the brand community of VW-Golf Club members in Taiwan. The researchers attended the annual meeting of club members and handed out questionnaires directly to the members. The degree centrality of each member was calculated using UCINET 6 for Windows, a social network analysis software application. This study adopts the partial least squares program to evaluate the measurement properties and structural relationships specified in the research model.

The findings suggest that when customers’ identification with a brand community becomes salient, they strengthen their emotional attachment to the brand and improve their centrality in the network. Consequently, emotional attachment can serve as a guiding principle in decision-making and thus strengthen brand equity and assessment of brand extensions. Central members will also gain greater benefits, including collaborative opportunities and influence, through their advantageous position in the network.

This study makes four main contributions to the brand community literature. First, this is the first empirical study to simultaneously examine the relationships among community identification (customer to community), emotional attachment to the brand (customer to brand) and network centrality (customer to customer). Second, the empirical framework depicts dual value-creation routes that explain how identification-based relationships can yield firm- and member-level benefits. With respect to firm-level benefits, this is the first empirical study to examine the brand equity and assessment of brand extension in the brand community research. Third, this study applies the rarely adopted UCINET 6 software to scrutinize the network data from the brand community. Finally, this paper examines three actions that organizations can leverage to enhance consumer identification with a brand community.

This paper aims to offer fresh insight into attitudes towards casually used brands and the role of tie strength in the building of online non-brand-related network relationships amongst young consumers.

Thirteen consumers aged between 18 and 24 years took part in in-depth interviews. The interviewees were matched on gender, age, occupation, residency and social media usage.

Tie strength effects are evident in changes to brand attitudes, choice of social media platforms and in the casual use of brands to further consumer relationship building and identity creation goals.

This paper answers calls for greater understanding of the way in which network structure influences consumers’ online motivations and attitudes towards the brand.

This paper explores the importance of managers viewing brands as embedded in broader social contexts and tailoring social media communications to those broader contexts.

This paper is the first to combine tie strength with casual brand use to examine non-brand-related network effects on brand attitudes, growing and maintaining consumer relationships and building online identity.

This paper aims to examine brand-generated communities from the community managers’ point of view and investigate how social media influences managerial perceptions, attitudes and practises around brand communities.

The literature review examines the most prominent constructs describing consumer groupings around brands. It then focuses on how the term “brand community” has evolved throughout the years and transformed in the social media environment. Research involving one survey and one focus group among agency-employed brand community managers was conducted to explore and interpret their views and their work.

Brand community managers aim to increase platform metrics. They encourage interaction between each user and the brand, but not between users. While they execute pre-planned content calendars handling comments, they do not have the experience and autonomy to foster a communal environment. Finally, managers rely on extrinsic incentives, and even antagonise users, regarding control over the community.

The sample covers the majority of agency-employed brand community managers in one country: Greece. The findings call for a re-examination of the construct of brand community, as well as for a new assessment of groupings consumers form around brands in social media.

For actual brand communities to emerge in social media, community managers should have more training, experience and initiative to tailor content and metrics, use intrinsic incentives and propose engaging activities. The quest for platform-imposed measurements inhibits this opportunity, and so do centralised processes that define global brand management.

The managerial aspect of brand-generated communities is understudied, especially when management is outsourced. This paper provides insight on how platform priorities and managerial practises dilute expectations that consumer-generated communities have created.

This paper contrasts research streams in corporate brand management (CBM) with perspectives on corporate strategy (CS). The aim is to examine whether CBM research is as diverse as research on CS and to identify potentially new research perspectives within CBM.

First, the main dimensions to capture approaches and directions in general strategy research are carved out and integrated into a framework for subsequent analysis (strategy descriptor cube). Second, research streams within CBM are clustered into predominating schools. Third, the framework is then used to classify the identified schools, allowing further evaluation. In doing so, an innovative view on the status of and developments in CBM research is provided.

Most schools of CBM are built on rational and prescriptive approaches, while political and emergent conceptions are hardly addressed. Thus, from the strategy-derived dimensions, approaches to CBM are surprisingly homogenous, with only one school diverging from the dominating pattern. A variety of perspectives as found in strategy research cannot be validated for CBM. Alternative conceptualizations to CBM in terms of assumptions about the genesis of strategic directions and the perspective of analysis might provide impetus for progress in CBM research.

The question arises why emergent and political perspectives have not been seriously pursued in the past decades of brand research. Researchers might seize opportunities to be further stimulated from the many faceted research approaches in CS. Further dimensions for description, as well as alternative clusterings of CBM schools, should be discussed.

A broadening of perspectives, including potentially a more attentive reception of agile trends in CBM, might become increasingly relevant for CBM practitioners. As new realities shape the present and future of corporate brand building, new paradigms should be explored and tested.

The corporate brand strategy link is evidently important; however, to date, few papers have such a focus. This is the first paper to apply reasoning and perspectives that have contributed to significant developments in CS research to the current situation in CBM research. It introduces a novel way to analyze and discuss developments between and within CBM schools.

Taking jointly into account social commerce and online brand community, this paper aims to investigate how the growth of social commerce and the fast adoption of online brand communities have given firms the opportunity to establish a new kind of community, namely, the social commerce brand community. Adopting a managerial perspective, the research aims to identify the core dimensions of social commerce brand community and shed light on how they contribute in engaging customers and transform them into brand advocates.

Five social commerce retailers operating into five different sectors of activity have been involved in a multiple case study. Data retrieved from semi-structured interviews have been triangulated with information gathered from different sources to provide depth to the cases and enhance data validity.

This study substantiates the rise of social commerce brand community as a new phenomenon that differs from traditional online brand communities and provides firms with concrete support in selling activities and in managing relationships with customers. The multiple case study allows also to detect social commerce brand community core pillars, namely, participants’ identification, participation, conversation and social support. These four elements turned out to be crucial to develop an effective social commerce brand community.

This study extends existing theory on social commerce and online brand community by investigating the social commerce brand community as a new phenomenon and clarifying the fundamental pillars on which it relies.

This study extends existing theory on social commerce and online brand community by investigating the social commerce brand community as a new phenomenon and clarifying the fundamental pillars on which it relies.

This study aims to focus on customer-initiated contact (CIC) discourse on Facebook brand pages. It concentrates on how brands manage CIC on Facebook when customers are more concerned with brand communications than product-related issues, price or distribution. A research framework from the perspective of consumer-initiated touch-point communication model is proposed.

Two case studies of Israeli TV ads are examined. Discourse between customers and brands on the Facebook pages of the latter are analyzed. Research was conducted in three phases: data collection, quantitative content analysis and thematic analysis.

It was demonstrated that customers use Facebook as a discourse platform for TV commercial brand advertising. However, brands are not always prepared to engage in online CIC involving advertising issues. The reply rate is moderate and the reply manner is not consistent, tending to be characterized as “official and dismissive.”

Data collection used a sample of two case studies. However, they generated rich findings, enough to support the purpose of the study.

This paper expands the contemporary CIC point of view and adds an integrated marketing communications (IMC) perspective. It extends the perception of CIC from product-level customer service to brand-level discourse. Finally, it fills the research gap by using a research tool based on consumer-initiated touch-point communication model. Theoretical and practical implications are presented.