The Empty Whitecoat

Could you feel sorry for an ad man?

There is a terriffic article on the BBC website about the growth of product placement in films and on TV. Especially interesting is the huge volume of comments the story has elicited from readers, reflecting both sides of the argument, against or indifferent to placement, although the majority are resoundly against. Some of these comments are very anti-marketing and worth a read to get an idea of how people are thinking about the spread of media intrusion.

Exploring Co-Creation: Dimensions and Definitions

Building on Prahalad and Ramaswamy's view of co-creation, here are some academically oriented dimensions and definitions I have been working on. I've open-sourced these in the hope of getting a dialogue going:

View of the market
The market is a forum for both value-creation and value-extraction and is enacted through the firm-customer experience

Role of the firm
Provider of experience gateways that facilitate multiple personalised customer co-creation value opportunities

Role of the individual customer
Sometimes giving, sometimes taking. Yet has higher levels of dependency on firm and customer community expertise. Not entirely rational and is sometimes happy to be surprised and engaged by a firms experiential offer.

Role of the Customer Community
Community is central to the concept of value co-creation. Firms encourage communities to develop and customers to interact in experience environments.

Perspective on individual knowledge / personal data ownership
Mutually held. Firm provides superior personalised experiences through setting up knowledge environments. The firm’s specialist resources and capabilities enable the creation of new customer knowledge and the continuous delivery of improved customer experiences

Role of the network
Process partnership – The customer and the firm, network partners and communities of consumers co-create value in the form of personalised experiences.

Source of value
Experience-based Value. Products become the artefacts around which customers derive personalised experiences. Value lies in the co-creation experience – i.e. in the actual experience of delivering and achieving the personalised outcome for the individual customer. Not just in the outcome itself. Value lies in personalised experiences that have specific context in time and space and for a specific event.

Who innovates?
Both firm and customer of course. Both emphasise or are motivated towards continuous improvement of personalised experiences

Nature of innovation
Sustainable – arguably. CC represents an evolutionary partnership and mutual based form of value-creation. Any firm can begin to build and experiment with new experience environments,e.g through more effective deployment of customer interface resources and an emphasis on customer learning.

Role of marketing
Marketing is fundamentally embedded in context to the personalised customer experience. Marketing performs an experience enhancement role and provides opportunities for customers to co-create personal value through participation in the brand.

Types of knowledge
Tacit and intangible forms of knowledge take centre-stage derived from experience-based and personalised forms of value that rely on a combination of sensory AND rational judgments of value. The firm must develop a knowledge of experience context by understanding how customers differ in their perception of experience attributes such as (randomly)

Risk Assessment;
Trust;
Convenience factors;
Transparency of choice;
Willingness to dialogue,
Firm Advocacy;
Knowledge;
Memory;
Simplicity of access;
Honesty
Time;
Involvement;
Meaning
Privacy;
Multi-channel access;
Promise;
Attention and,
Community factors

Nature of firm competition
Who can deliver the most personalised experience by understanding and addressing the above increasingly important dimensions of customer value