Content area
Full text
J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2016) 44:290315 DOI 10.1007/s11747-014-0397-2
ORIGINAL EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Value co-creation: concept and measurement
Kumar Rakesh Ranjan & Stuart Read
Received: 27 September 2013 /Accepted: 3 July 2014 /Published online: 5 August 2014 # Academy of Marketing Science 2014
Abstract The surge in academic and practical interest in the topic of value co-creation (VCC) highlights an equivocal understanding of its conceptual boundaries and empirical constituents. Our search of the diverse scholarly literature on VCC identified 149 papers, from which we extract the two primary conceptual VCC dimensions of co-production and value-in-use. Though the combination of these two distinct dimensions is theoretically necessary to describe VCC, 79% of the studies in our dataset consider only one or the other. Such underlying theoretical ambiguity may explain conflicting results in earlier studies and motivates our effort to offer four contributions to the literature. First, we conduct a rigorous review, integrating existing work to expose the theoretical core of VCC. Second, we utilize the results from our review to isolate the two main theoretical dimensions of VCC and expose the three conceptual elements which underlie each dimension. Third, we apply our theoretical findings to derive empirical measurement constructs for each dimension. Fourth, we refine, analyze, and test the resulting measurement index in an investigation into consumer satisfaction.
Keywords Valueco-creation .Co-production .Value-in-use . Quantitative measurement . Service-dominant logic
Introduction
Value co-creation (VCC) has gained the attention of academics and practitioners as an overarching concept that describes collaboration between multiple stakeholders (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000). Fuelled by the influential study by Vargo and Lusch (2004) on a co-creative service-dominant logic (SDL) of marketing, research interest in VCC has grown in recent years. Yet, as theoretical and empirical work has blossomed in different directions, the theoretical roots of VCC have grown more ambiguous. Investigations of VCC in the contexts of (customer) relationships, stakeholder interactions, consumer centricism, co-design, self-service, co-production, relationship marketing, and experiential marketing (Cova 1997; Delgado-Ballester and Munuera-Alemn 2005; Fournier 1998; Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Morgan and Hunt 1994; Oliver 1999; Pine and Gilmore 1998) have not adhered to a consistent theoretical perspective of VCC, resulting in an understanding that is equivocal at best (Cova et al. 2011; Ford 2011; Grnroos 2012; Leroy et al. 2013).
In...