Firm-brand community value co-creation as alignment of practices

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge regarding the nature of successful and unsuccessful value co-creation processes between firms and brand communities and the strategies used to address the latter. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a netnographic study of the online collaborative platform known as Alfisti.com, which carmaker Alfa Romeo launched to enhance co-creation with its most devoted consumers, the “Alfisti”. Findings – The findings identify three groups of collaborative practices: interacting, identity and organizing practices. The paper details how firm and brand community members enact the elements – procedures, understandings and engagements – of collaborative practices and how the alignment of these enactments impacts value co-creation. Research limitations/implications – The paper suggests that co-creation of value succeeds when the enactment of collaborative practices aligns, i.e. when firm and brand community members enact practices in a similar way, and that co-creation fails when the enactment of practices misaligns. Firms and brand communities use three realignment strategies – compliance, interpretation and orientation – to address the misalignment and failure of co-creation. The fact that the research draws on a single qualitative case study is a limitation. Practical implications – Managerial implications include using realignment strategies to manage firm-brand community co-creation. Originality/value – Creating an empirical-based framework regarding successful and failing co-creation and how the latter is addressed in the context of brand community makes the paper original.

Everything Flows: A Pragmatist Perspective of Trade-Offs and Value in Ethical Consumption

“…Practice theories have been taken up both by those with a broad interest in consumption (e.g. Goulding et al 2013;Halkier et al 2011;Skålén et al 2015) and also those with a special interest in ethical consumption and environmental behaviour change (for example Connolly and Prothero 2008;Garcia-Ruiz and Rodriguez-Lluesma 2014;Moraes et al 2015;Røpke 2009;Shaw and Riach 2011). Here, social practices are taken as the everyday and ordinary, enacted in routine and oriented (or not) towards ethical behaviour.…”

Conceptualizing the Value Co-Destruction Process for Service Systems: Literature Review and Synthesis

“…Intentional value codestruction, in turn, refers to a service system intentionally misusing resources in order to gain more benefit-described as well-being-and capacity for adaptiveness for itself, to the detriment of those of another system [8]. Intentions to co-destroy or not to co-create value [8,23,36,49,50,63], opportunism or deviancy [37, 47-49, 51-54, 56], and changes in intentions [31,35,48,[55][56][57] are implied to herald value codestruction in the literature.…”

Brand community coping

“…Give me a break… Now, when someone criticizes your work with valid and well thought-out arguments, you have to shove your fingers in your ears and start screaming "vocal minority" and "artistic integrity." (BillSmith, August 2012) BillSmith calls Bioware out for actively promoting its co-creation history and frames the current brand transgression as a betrayal of that alignment pattern (Skålen et al, 2015). The poster also envisions a future where Bioware would lose the co-creative support of its community and paints it as a loss for Bioware.…”

“…To avoid such outcomes, the literature emphasizes an alignment between consumermarketer expectations and the brand relationship history (Gambetti & Graffina, 2015;Russell, Russell, & Honea, 2015), and, more importantly, the integration of brand community and the marketer in a shared set of practices (Schau et al, 2009;Skålen, Pace, & Cova, 2015). Practice alignment poses difficulties, as consumers often perceive the marketer's attempts to control the conversation in a brand community as an overreach, and expect marketers to perform additional social and emotional brand labor to prove their commitment, which can drain resources (Cova et al, 2015b;McAlexander et al, 2002).…”

“…Practice alignment poses difficulties, as consumers often perceive the marketer's attempts to control the conversation in a brand community as an overreach, and expect marketers to perform additional social and emotional brand labor to prove their commitment, which can drain resources (Cova et al, 2015b;McAlexander et al, 2002). If co-creation does fail, research reveals collaborative practices of realignment, including compliance, interpretation, and orientation, that brand communities and marketers enact to rebalance the relationship (Skålen et al, 2015).…”