Critical Perspectives on Consumers' Role as "Producers": Broadening the Debate on Value Co-Creation in Marketing Processes Call for Papers

Premise. A number of research streams point toward an increasing involvement of consumers in the value creation through marketing processes. Collaborative innovation, service dominant logic, customer competence co-optation, and value co-production are different labels used to address roughly the same issue: the more the consumer is involved in the "making of" goods and services, the higher will be his or her commitment to the collaboration process, identification with the collaboration outcome, and willingness to buy. In addition to these consumer-specific effects, proponents of the collaboration/co-production model suggest that integrating customers in the production of market value is not only economically necessary (it is the consumer that gives actual value to goods and services) and strategically effective (consumers are more willing to pay for something they have contributed to) but essential for maintaining competitive advantage through innovation (Joshi and Sharma, 2004; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). Question. The question is: who benefits from these processes? The vast majority of work on collaboration, co-production, and the service dominant logic provides convincing evidence that the benefits of customer-marketer co-production of value are distributed fairly between the two parties. Producers make a profit while consumers receive the opportunity to buy goods and services in which consumers perceive to have a stake by having actively been involved in the need identification and design processes, resulting in goods and services filled with subjective meanings both before and after actual purchase. This is real value consumers produce for the market and get back from the market.

This production of real value through relevance is certainly one way how consumers can benefit from a more active role in the market(ing) process. In addition, consumers receive material benefits (e.g., a new release of the product they are working on) as well as symbolic and social rewards (e.g., recognition from, and respect of other members of the creative community). Companies, of course, benefit from an economic point of view: e.g. from faster, less costly, and often less risky new product development and innovation processes or through the outsourcing to consumers the work required to actually complete the "manufacturing" of the good or service, while potentially charging the same consumer a premium for this opportunity. In short, the co-production paradigm allows companies to unlock and capture new forms of economic market value from consumer participation in market(ing) processes. To what degree consumers benefit from the economic value they help create is less clear. Indeed, if taken from a critical perspective, we wonder if the consumer co-production model represents a new, albeit non-alienating and often voluntary form of exploitation? The Special Issue. Marketing Theory is pleased to invite papers for a special issue on consumer involvement in marketing processes. The special issue will be edited by Bernard Cova (Euromed Marseille, France), Daniele Dalli (University of Pisa, Italy), and Detlev Zwick (Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada).

Reflecting the editors' different cultural, educational, and experiential backgrounds, they draw on a range of established but also in the field of marketing and consumer research lesser known intellectual traditions to shed a new and often critical light on the increasingly popular debates on customer co-production, collaboration, and collective innovation. For example, in their recent publications on the topic (e.g., Cova and Dalli, Forthcoming; Zwick et al., 2008), the editors develop links with and take cues from (among others):

• Neo/post Marxist approaches

• Theories of the sociology of the gift

• Cultural studies of marketing techniques and practices

The fields of critical marketing studies and consumer culture theory provide a rich body of empirical accounts and conceptual material that offer opportunities to articulate a cohesive critique to the mainstream discourse on co-production in marketing. Yet, as the editors' own work signals, we are also hoping for contributions that make use of intellectual traditions popular in the wider critical social sciences but seldom seen in marketing. Indeed, we believe that the effort of developing theoretically sophisticated and conceptually rigorous, critical contributions to this important debate in marketing will require interdisciplinary approaches to the topic.

For this special issue, we invite scholars to advance the critical interrogation of the co-production paradigm. We invite theoretical contributions, methodological papers, critical essays, empirical accounts of consumer involvement in the making of market value. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Critical theories of value in the service-dominant logic

• (Non-) Alienation and exploitation in the co-production of

  • consumption experiences

  • innovation of goods and services

  • cultural object

  • etc.

• Techniques of appropriation and re-appropriation of consumer labor

• Tribal entrepreneurship and community made value

• Resisting and countervailing market (consumer) responses to co-optation

Papers should be sent electronically to Bernard Cova (bernard.Cova@euromed-management.com), Daniele Dalli (dalli@ec.unipi.it), or Detlev Zwick (dzwick@schulich.yorku.ca). The deadline for submission of papers is 1st October 2009. The issue is slated for publication in 2011.

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