In this day and age, interaction is an integral determinant for business as well as for leisure activities. The collaborative nature of social exchange serves as an explanatory approach for different fields of personal and professional life. Modern technology development and digital innovations facilitate interaction and thus, multilateral relationships. Since 2004, when Vargo and Lusch (2004) as well as Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) published their seminal articles about the service-dominant logic and co-creation, scholars started to discuss social interaction through the lens of value co-creation. The paradigm shift from a goods-dominant logic to a service-dominant logic not only provides valuable ideas for different research streams in service marketing and management academia but also nurtures practical implications.
Value co-creation emphasises contributions by all actors, regardless of their respective roles, as paramount for the collaborative creation of value. Throughout adjustment and adaption, the initial focus of B2C or B2B shifted to actor-to-actor (A2A), where the roles of providers and beneficiaries are merging to economic and social actors as resource integrators (Vargo
& Lusch, 2017). An actor thereby represents an individual human or machine as well as collections of humans or machines, including technologies and organisations (Storbacka, Brodie, Böhmann, Maglio, & Nenonen, 2016). Hence, value co-creation centres actors’
provision and use of resources to increase well-being, and consequently value. This process of resource integration is governed by shared formal and informal institutions (Brodie, Fehrer, Jaakkola, & Conduit, 2019; Vargo & Lusch, 2016).
Scott (2013) differentiates between regulative (e.g. rules and laws), normative (e.g. values, norms and social obligations), and cultural-cognitive (e.g. common beliefs and shared understanding) institutional pillars. Institutions are dynamic and revised, changed and adapted by actors (Lusch & Nambisan, 2015). By these means, institutions control actors’
behaviours, and actors’ behaviours consequently shape institutions in a virtuous cycle.
Social interaction being described through the lens of value co-creation sheds light into diverse contexts of relationships. To dig deeper into actors’ interaction and the value co-creation process, it is crucial to refer to other behavioural and dispositional approaches. As such the relational concept of customer engagement uses the general theoretical perspective
of service-dominant logic to further elaborate on active interaction and network development (Brodie, Hollebeek, Jurić, & Ilić, 2011; Kumar et al., 2010). Literature refers to customer engagement as a multidimensional concept, including “cognitive, emotional and/or behavioural dimensions” (Brodie et al., 2011, p. 260). Van Doorn et al. (2010, p. 254) emphasize the behavioural dimension and state that “customer engagement behaviors go beyond transactions, and may be specifically defined as a customer’s behavioral manifestations that have a brand or firm focus, beyond purchase, resulting from motivational drivers”. Consequently, customer engagement is determined by an actor’s psychological state (Brodie et al., 2011) or by behavioural patterns (van Doorn et al., 2010) in favour of a brand or firm that exceed the core relation with the respective brand.
Advancing the understanding of customer engagement and value co-creation, Breidbach and Brodie (2017) propose to include the perspective of engagement platforms. Engagement platforms are defined as touchpoints, both physical and virtual in nature, that support the integration of resources and, thus, value co-creation (Breidbach, Brodie, & Hollebeek, 2014).
Engagement platforms facilitate interaction in various contexts.
Focal actors operate engagement platforms and, thereby, mediate between participating actors. As such, they provide the infrastructure to support interaction and value co-creation on platforms. The infrastructure consists of activities associated with the development, maintenance, and adaption of physical, virtual, and informational infrastructure (Stabell &
Fjeldstad, 1998). At the same time, engagement platform operators act as resource integrators that provide other resources besides the platform itself. All actors provide their own resources, and use and benefit from the resources of others. This contributes to the co-creation of value on engagement platforms.
Research in this area started with a strong focus on dyadic relationships between actors on engagement platforms. Those focal actors and the analysis of their interaction are an essential element of the actor-centric research perspective. However, more recent literature calls for broadening the scope of engagement research, investigating broader notions of actors, and shifting the focus from dyads to networks (Alexander, Jaakkola, & Hollebeek, 2018;
Breidbach & Brodie, 2017; Storbacka et al., 2016).
To follow this call for research, the thesis applies a systemic perspective to enrich the actor-centric perspective with a more holistic view on co-creation and engagement platforms (see chapter 1.2.1.2).
As the concept of engagement is recognized for bridging empirical knowledge with the theoretical lens of value co-creation (Alexander et al., 2018), this thesis uses both, empirical and conceptual approaches to elaborate on value co-creation and engagement platforms (see chapter 1.2.1.1).
The ideas of value co-creation and engagement platforms are fully applicable to management practice. Both perspectives are closely aligned with managers’ terminologies, and numerous examples demonstrate implementations for management. For instance, sporting goods manufacturers such as Nike or Adidas, use digital platforms for their customers to engage in co-designing athletic apparel (Frow, Nenonen, Payne, & Storbacka, 2015). Online based engagement platforms, like Netflix or Spotify, align their business models with their customers’ interaction and engagement to use the information in order to provide individualized offerings through their machine learning-based recommendation algorithms.
Firms from various industries use open innovation platforms to foster interaction and provide employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders with the opportunity to engage in the exchange of experiences, knowledge, problems, and ultimately solutions to collaboratively co-create value. Such open innovation engagement platforms cover a wide range of application areas such as product or service development, environmental initiatives, and technological or social innovations. Through interaction, firms are able to benefit from other actor’s resource integration on engagement platforms. Paired with firm’s own resource provision, e.g. in the form of virtual or physical platforms or other kinds of resources, business is initiated.
Consequently, actors’ collaboration through resource integration on engagement platforms facilitates interaction and thus, business activities. Managers have to be aware of how these encounters or touchpoints need to be designed to support actors’ contributions and enhance the co-creation of value (Payne, Storbacka, & Frow, 2008). The touchpoints for interaction and engagement are crucial in all kinds of business relationships in service management and beyond.
Hereinafter, the sport context is used to conceptualise and investigate value co-creation and the business facilitating nature of engagement platforms. Sport is a service industry where special characteristics need to be taken into account, and it also covers an extensive spectrum of actors and activities. Richelieu and Webb (2019, p. 3) refer to this variety as a continuum
“from kids playing hockey in the street, to jogging with a dog, to highly coded, structured,
politicized, and disciplined events”. Woratschek, Horbel, and Popp (2014) also highlight the uniqueness of the sport context by describing the mix of volunteers and professionals, coopetition, event management, and emotionalized customers, or rather fans. Despite sport’s special characteristics, it also features overlapping matters of concern and themes with other fields and industries, such as value creation, product and service innovations, branding, or business development.
Sport management academia, however, lacks to apply the ideas of value co-creation and especially actor engagement on platforms to explain the importance of interactions and relationships in the sport context. The traditional understanding in sport management assumes that sport consumers pay for the output of combined resources because they want to consume the value that is embedded within sport products and services. Woratschek and Griebel (2020) call this traditional approach of sport production and consumption the “logic of sport products”.
The sport value framework published by Woratschek et al. (2014) introduced the service-dominant logic to sport management literature, and many scholars adopted those ideas ever since. But the sport value framework and most subsequent studies put special emphasis to the sport event and neglect other settings. Moreover, ideas of engagement platforms and their facilitative role for business in sports are under-researched in sport management. In addition to that, the transfer of these theoretical ideas has the potential to nurture the way of thinking in sport management practice. (Service) marketing literature clearly shows how these ideas are able to shed light into interactions, resource integration and ultimately co-creation of value in different kinds of service settings from an academic as well as from a practical perspective.
Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to a general understanding of value co-creation.
Moreover, it analyses the role of engagement platforms in both service management academia and practice. The sport context is used as a research subject. Based on this, the subordinate topic of the thesis is as follows:
How can actors’ resource integration on engagement platforms nurture a new conceptual understanding of interaction and value co-creation in the sport management context?