Exploring Customers’ Motives to Engage in Value Co-creation: An Abstract

Abstract

Value co-creation referred to as joint creation of value by the company and the customer to co-construct personalized experience (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004) has been the recent trend in the services marketing literature (Vargo and Lusch 2016). Value co-creation is capable of leveraging positive results for both customers and service providers, and yet, many service providers are struggling to motivate customers to engage in co-creation activities (Sugathan et al. 2017). Value co-creation maximizes the lifetime value of customer segments (Payne and Frow 2005) and reinforces the relationships between customers and brands (Hajli et al. 2017). Merz et al. (2018) claimed that while co-creating value, brand equity also gets co-created. The value co-creation practice also encourages the customers who are acting as co-creators to spread positive word-of-mouth (Merz et al. 2018). However, there is limited empirical research examining the motivation to engage in co-creation behavior and determining the relationship between value co-creation, customer-based brand equity (hereafter, CBBE) and word-of-mouth (hereafter, WOM). Considering the conceptual ambiguity and limited application in practice, the objectives of this study is twofold: (1) to identify customers’ motivations to engage in value co-creation process; (2) to examine the relationship between value co-creation and CBBE and WOM behavior. The results from this study contribute to the body of knowledge in multiple ways. Our first contribution lies in examining the impact of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations on value co-creation in a smart tourism context. Our second contribution emanates from extending the work of Neghina et al. (2017) in the smart tourism services context. The nature of motivation leveraged towards value co-creation in the existing literature has been mostly qualitative, exploratory studies (Engstrom and Elg 2015; Roberts et al. 2014), however, this study applied the self-determination theory and conducted a quantitative analysis that contributes to value co-creation. Our third contribution is related to testing the impact of communicating, relating, and knowing mechanisms on value co-creation. Our final contribution is in validating the impact of value co-creation on CBBE and WOM behavior.