Abstract
The current business paradigm entails a narrow, profit-centered and managerially-focused nature. This article proposes that the study of the collaborative economy necessitates an inevitable shift in the conventional business paradigm and suggests that the institutional school of marketing thought, in general, and the electric theory of marketing, in particular, offers a useful theoretical framework for investigating the theoretical impact of the collaborative economy on the value chain. Uber is used as an illustrative case, on which the electric theory of marketing is applied, to demonstrate how the archetype of the collaborative economy theoretically impacts the value chain and contributes to sustainability in the value chain in the transportation services industry. The study provides further insights in the form of suggestions and propositions for ensuring sustainability in the value chain of collaborative systems.
Highlights
Value creation has traditionally been associated with the corporate world
By examining the process involving the driver and the user, we demonstrate how Uber theoretically impacts the value chain by contributing superiorly to marketing circuit closure, through improved flow of order, service, and payment, thereby explaining its edge in value creation [25] and marketing agency [10] (p. 4) in the service value chain
Since Breyer [10] equates this agency with the marketing machinery, it follows that a service like Uber contributes more effectively to the marketing machinery through an increased supply chain efficiency
Summary
Value creation has traditionally been associated with the corporate world. Yet, the collaborative economy (hereafter, CE) enables individuals to create value as well, by redistributing or mutualizing resources to producers, governments, or other individuals [1]. The CE disrupts conventional frames of value creation, supply chain configurations, exchange modes, and market frontiers In light of such conceptual reshaping of our view, an appropriate study of the CE and its theoretical impact on the value chain necessitates the adaptation of a broader framework of analysis than the one commonly employed in business scholarly research, including environmental studies and industrial ecology research. A broader framework enables a better assessment from a triple bottom line (i.e., people-planet-profit) perspective [9], which we shall term, in accordance with Breyer’s [10] theory, acquisitive efficiency, social effectiveness, and environmental effectiveness In marketing, both the theoretical and conceptual tools to adopt a broader orientation, such as the institutional school of thought [11], as CE necessitates, are already in place. The acknowledgement of an intermingling, rather than a distinction between production and consumption, makes Breyer’s theory suitable for the study of the CE
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