THE CO-CREATION STRATEGIES IN TIMES OF CRISIS: CULTURAL RESOURCES, ACTORS, AND THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

In the digital era, co-creating value with consumers through social media (SM) has become a promising marketing strategy for companies to achieve business goals and competitive advantages. Despite the popularity of such online co-creation, harnessing the power of consumers through appropriate social media marketing (SMM) strategies is an ongoing challenge, especially for companies in industries heavily affected by a global crisis. The dissertation aims to advance the understanding of firms’ co-creation strategies that integrate with SM and its application during a global crisis. The key objective is to answer the following research questions: what are the important factors or actors that influence consumers’ value co-creation on SM and how can SMM be strategically utilized and managed by companies to facilitate consumers’ value co-creation, especially in a global crisis setting? This study draws on service-dominant logic, consumer culture theory, the view of inconspicuous consumption, and country-of-origin concepts. The dissertation is presented as a collection of three papers and uses a mixed-method approach, including both qualitative and quantitative research designs. The first paper of the collection conceptualizes consumers’ value co-creation from the axioms and foundational premises of service-dominant logic and dimensions of consumer culture theory. It explains and validates the mechanism of consumers’ value co-creation process during the pandemic. The results show that consumer operant resources are radically determining the main outputs of the consumer’ co-creation, which are represented by consumer creative behaviours. The second and third paper further analyse and highlight the important role of consumers’ cultural operant resources for the success of co-creation strategies, indicating that consumer-possessed cultural resources greatly impact firms’ formulation and implementation of SMM strategies and co-creation strategies. The second paper also suggests that non-consumer and non-firm actors in online co-creation networks can be regarded as desirable marketing partners and value co-creators due to their high level of relevance to both consumers and firms. Therefore, this study suggests that firms should use more consumer-centric and cultural-oriented marketing strategies during the pandemic and engage external actors in value co-creation in order to embrace social media’s communal logic. This research thus makes important theoretical contributions to several research fields and provides useful managerial implications for formulating co-creation strategies in times of a global crisis.