Consumers today have more choices of products and services than ever before, but they seem dissatisfied. Firms invest in greater product variety but are less able to differentiate themselves. Growth and value creation have become the dominant themes for managers. In this paper, we explain this paradox. The meaning of value and the process of value creation are rapidly shifting from a product- and firm-centric view to personalized consumer experiences. Informed, networked, empowered, and active consumers are increasingly co-creating value with the firm. The interaction between the firm and the consumer is becoming the locus of value creation and value extraction. As value shifts to experiences, the market is becoming a forum for conversation and interactions between consumers, consumer communities, and firms. It is this dialogue, access, transparency, and understanding of risk-benefits that is central to the next practice in value creation.

The traditional system of company‐centric value creation (that has served us so well over the past 100 years) is becoming obsolete. Leaders now need a new frame of reference for value creation. In the emergent economy, competition will center on personalized co‐creation experiences, resulting in value that is truly unique to each individual. The authors see a new frontier in value creation emerging, replete with fresh opportunities. In this new frontier the role of the consumer has changed from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active. As a result, companies can no longer act autonomously, designing products, developing production processes, crafting marketing messages, and controlling sales channels with little or no interference from consumers. Armed with new tools and dissatisfied with available choices, consumers want to interact with firms and thereby co‐create value. The use of interaction as a basis for co‐creation is at the crux of our emerging reality. The co‐creation experience of the consumer becomes the very basis of value. The authors offer a DART model for managing co‐creation of value processes.

This study tested whether, among consumers in developing countries, brands perceived as having a nonlocal country of origin, especially from the West, are attitudinally preferred to brands seen as local, for reasons not only of perceived quality but also of social status. We found that this perceived brand nonlocalness effect was greater for consumers who have a greater admiration for lifestyles in economically developed countries, which is consistent with findings from the cultural anthropology literature. The effect was also found to be stronger for consumers who were high in susceptibility to normative influence and for product categories high in social signaling value. This effect was also moderated by product category familiarity, but not by consumer ethnocentrism. The results, thus, suggest that in developing countries, a brand's country of origin not only serves as a “quality halo” or summary of product quality (cf. Han, 1989), but also possesses a dimension of nonlocalness that, among some consumers and for some product categories, contributes to attitudinal liking for status‐enhancing reasons.

The PIMS (Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies) data entail sparse time-series observations for a large number of strategic business units (SBUs), In order to estimate disaggregate marketing mix elasticities of demand, a natural solution is to pool different SBUs. The traditional, a priori approach is to pool together those SBUs which one believes in advance to be very similar with respect to their marketing mix elasticities. We propose an alternative maximum likelihood, latent-pooling method for simultaneously pooling, estimating, and testing linear regression models . This method enables the determination of a “fuzzy” pooling scheme, while directly estimating a set of marketing mix elasticities and intertemporal covariances for each pool of SBUs. Our analyses reveal different magnitudes and patterns of marketing mix elasticities for the derived pools. Pool membership is influenced by demand characteristics, business scope, and order of market entry.econometric models, regression and other statistical techniques, marketing mix, competitive strategy