Critical perspectives on consumers’ role as ‘producers’: Broadening the debate on value co-creation in marketing processes

Abstract

This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad’s value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake — conceptually and politically — when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide definitive answers but instead lead to a more elaborate set of questions. By doing so, they broaden the critical engagement with value co-creation in marketing.

Enhancing Education for Sustainable Development in Environmental University Programmes: A Co-Creation Approach

“…Finally, our research proves to be a helpful tool that can help universities benefit from the potential of co-creation, enabling for them to develop a competitive strategy that will generate more value for their undergraduate environmental students, and which will also be difficult for the competition to copy, a point made by [89] in relation to developing differentiation strategies.…”

‘From mosh pit to posh pit’: Festival imagery in the context of the boutique festival

“…While consumers are afforded an active role following a co-creative approach, views differ on whether it is an expression of creative agency in their own interest, or ultimately exploitation in the form of free labour through the expropriation of knowledge, creativity and communication (e.g. Cova, Dalli and Zwick 2011;Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody 2008). Although we do not aim to explicitly contribute to this debate, the value co-creation paradigm presents a noteworthy context for our study.…”

How users shape markets

“…The STS-informed co-construction of users and technology tradition (Akrich, 1992(Akrich, , 1995Oudshoorn andPinch, 2003a, b, 2009;Woolgar, 1991), the user innovation literature (Franke and Shah, 2003;von Hippel, 1986von Hippel, , 2005von Hippel, , 2007 1 and research on value co-creation in marketing (Vargo andLusch, 2004, 2008;Cova et al, 2011) provide support for our basic contention that users are involved in shaping markets. However, these literatures typically centre upon how users contribute to the development of new technologies and new markets (e.g.…”

“…von Hippel, 2007;Flowers, 2008;Schulz and Wagner, 2008). This blurred distinction between production and consumption, as well as the altered power dynamics that result from increasingly active users, raise concerns about user exploitation (Zwick et al, 2008;Cova and Dalli, 2009;Cova et al, 2011) and creates challenges for suppliers in terms of monetizing user efforts (Arvidsson, 2011).…”

“…The term 'users' is variously interpreted as consumers, employees, user firms, customers, prosumers, co-creators, technology designers, individual innovators, patients and citizens, depending on the context (Rose and Blume, 2003;Flowers, 2008;Weiner, 2010). While 'users' are typically treated as equivalent to customers or consumers within marketing, a similarly bewildering plethora of terms is used (Cova et al, 2011).…”