Co-creating value in post-communists contexts: capability perspective

What is it about?

This research follows on from and extends prior research on customer co-creation by incorporating the organizational perspective into CCC research, which would appear to be of particular importance for post -communist service marketing settings characterized by relatively low social capital, and high power distance, as well as entrepreneurial customers. The research conceptualizes and empirically tests customer co-creation capability in the specific context of Business-to-Customer services in Poland. The target customers in such context are relatively capable of co-creating innovations, but there is a need for a coordination mechanism to foster this process through the whole innovation cycle. This research demonstrates that customer co-creation should be facilitated by routinized stimulating of customer word of mouth, as well as an organized transformation of customer insights into service improvements. The research also illustrates that such routines are especially useful in bigger service companies as these companies face more complex organizational challenges when confronted with CCC-related opportunities, both internally and in customer relationships. These routines are suggested here to be relatively universal for post-communist European economies, but it is also proposed that their relevance be verified with regard to cultural settings which, on the one hand, have relatively low social capital, and on the other a relatively high acceptance of hierarchies. Last but not least, although applying CCC-related organizational routines may at the moment seem only to fit certain specific socio-economic settings in which service companies operate, given the social and geopolitical trends of today, they may become much more universal in the near future. This is due to an observable shift in power asymmetry on an international scale, with global supply chains becoming less Anglo-Saxon-centric that they were over the previous three decades. Globalization itself was treated for a long time as synonymous with the Americanization of consumer behavior, however, it now appears to be much more complex than a decade ago. This research suggests that service companies should make special organizational efforts to address this complexity, especially when operating in CESEE countries and introducing new services in such settings.

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