‘It’s not us, it’s them!’ – Rethinking value co-creation among multiple actors

Abstract

Marketing theory has conceptualised value co-creation through research on provider and consumer resource integrations. Little attention, however, has been devoted to how companies, consumers, and other stakeholders interact and co-create value in the context of multiple interactions. This study, therefore, explores co-creation by investigating the football experience, which is characterised by often-complex relations of multiple actors involved. Through a sociocultural perspective, actors’ resource integration is understood as being dependent on the shifting and contradicting interests of actors, which renders actors both enabled and also constrained in their interactive processes. This study demonstrates that actors’ contradictory resource integrations and interactions are fundamental for value to be co-created, since they give rise to new interpretations and meaning creations. In conclusion, the study reveals regulations, the media, and the collective strength of consumers to be unbalancing and yet creative mechanisms within the value co-creation process.

Keywords:

• co-creation
• value
• S-D logic
• interaction
• resource integration

Notes

1. ¹ Bengali fire is a form of torches/flares used in football stadia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Fyrberg Yngfalk

Anna Fyrberg Yngfalk is assistant professor and postdoc researcher at the Stockholm University School of Business. Her research is in marketing theory and consumer culture studies and she combines an organisational perspective with questions about how consumers create value in the market. She is particularly interested in how marketing practices organise company-consumer relations.