Customer value co-creation behavior: Scale development and validation
Introduction
Practitioners' and scholars' interest in the service-dominant (S-D) logic of marketing has increased sharply in the last decade (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Although previous customer behavior literature has focused on the customer decision-making process regarding purchases, customers are not merely responders but rather active value creators, and scholars need to focus on customer behavior in this regard (Xie, Bagozzi, & Troye, 2008). The core concept of S-D logic is that the customer is always a co-creator of value. As active participants and collaborative partners in relational exchanges, customers co-create value with the firm through involvement in the entire service-value chain.
To date, few studies have systematically explored the exact nature of dimensionality of customer value co-creation behavior, leaving its precise composition unclear. Some studies use a multidimensional approach to capture customer value co-creation behavior and consider it to consist of many distinctive components (e.g., Bettencourt, 1997, Bove et al., 2008, Groth, 2005), whereas other studies employ a unidimensional approach and use single- or multiple-item measures (e.g., Cermak et al., 1994, Dellande et al., 2004, Fang et al., 2008). However, this method ignores the conceptual richness of customer value co-creation behavior. None of the previous research explores the relationship between the overall construct and its dimensions. Therefore, both practitioners and scholars need research that (1) clearly identifies and measures customers' behavior in co-creating value, (2) fully validates a comprehensive customer value co-creation behavior construct, and (3) explores the hierarchical dimensionality of customer value co-creation behavior. The primary motivation for this study is thus the development and validation of a scale to measure customer value co-creation behavior.
The present article makes several contributions. First and most important, the scale will be useful not only in academic research but also in practice. As marketers engage in projects to understand and improve the value co-creation behaviors of their customers, they can use the scale for assessing, planning, and tracking purposes. Second, the firm can use the scale to detect weaknesses and strengths of customer value co-creation behavior. Based on their customer behavior assessment and business strategies, companies can allocate corporate resources to the important customer value co-creation aspects uncovered by this study. Third, the scale could be used for all types of service industries. Unfortunately, the previous related constructs were not applied to many contexts. In fact, researchers were unable to identify any broad or abstract category of customer value co-creation attributes. As an alternative, this study offers a new protocol to measuring customer value co-creation behavior that captures all related dimensions of customer behavior across industries.
The current research first defines customer value co-creation behavior and the dimensions that compose the concept. This research then reports a series of studies that develop a measure of customer value co-creation behavior and assess the new measure's reliability and validity.
Section snippets
Customer value co-creation behavior and its dimensions
Early research identifies two types of customer value co-creation behavior: customer participation behavior, which refers to required (in-role) behavior necessary for successful value co-creation, and customer citizenship behavior, which is voluntary (extra-role) behavior that provides extraordinary value to the firm but is not necessarily required for value co-creation (Bove et al., 2008, Groth, 2005, Yi and Gong, 2008, Yi et al., 2011). Empirical evidence shows that in-role and extra-role
Study 1: item generation
This research generated an initial pool of more than 100 items from a review of previous literature and exploratory in-depth interviews. In the interviews, 15 students and five adult customers were asked to describe in an open-ended format the behaviors they exhibit during a service encounter. The purpose of the in-depth interviews was to uncover specific characteristics of customer value co-creation behavior. The interviews were transcribed, analyzed, and converted into items.
Following
Discussion
The study makes a number of theoretical contributions. Through qualitative and empirical research, this study has developed and validated the customer value co-creation behavior scale. The scale conforms to a third-order factor model that ties customer value co-creation behavior to two distinct dimensions: participation and citizenship. Each of these dimensions comprises four sub-dimensions: information seeking, information sharing, responsible behavior, and personal interaction in the case of
Acknowledgment
This paper was supported by the Institute of Management Research at Seoul National University.
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