Brands and value co-creation
One of the tenets of value-based brands is that brands can help companies co-create value with their customers. Given the right brand strategy, this will create new forms of strategic value, resulting in competitive advantage for the company, and significant advances for customers.
A productive conversation
I recently posted a comment on brands and value co-creation on Wim Rampen’s excellent blog. The particular post includes Wim’s general definition of value co-creation, as well as many excellent comments from others. Especially useful to me were links to work by Graham Hill and Chris Lawler, especially Chris’s diagram on the Eight Styles of Company-Customer Value Co-Creation. Review the diagram full-screen and you will begin to see more than a few strategic brand opportunities.
I’ve included my comments below. The only change I’ve made is to add sub-heads to separate the text into more readable sections.
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Wim,
Great post and discussion —
I might suggest that we place value co-creation in the larger context of “creating customers,” in the Peter Drucker sense. The goal of any business is to create the customers who drive the business forward. Co-creating value with customers is a key ingredient in this process.
A strategic context for value co-creation
I’d be in favor of defining a strategic context for value co-creation. The goal is to co-create new forms of value that competitors can’t match, and that sustain the business going forward. This is an open-ended process based on the formula: company potential X customer potential, where companies employ a platform approach that places company and customer on the same page, writing it together. This is a shared creative context that transcends the traditional vendor/consumer relationship.
Brands and value co-creation
In my view the only discipline that can deliver these results is brands, with their programmatic power to produce outcomes ranging from the practical, to creative, to emotional to sublime. (Not traditional brands of course, but a new form of brands as modes of innovation.)
Further thoughts for brand builders
Further thoughts:
– A company’s master strategy to create customers will include its value co-creation strategies.
– Value co-creation means that the customer (in some context) re-creates himself or herself through the process.
– Properly designed, a program of value co-creation will create customers who are beyond the reach of competitors.
– Strategically, the new forms of co-created value should be the groundwork for new business models.
– A platform approach is the best way to co-create value with customers.
– In value co-creation, context is king—hence the importance of brands, as they are engines of context creation.
– To co-create optimum value with customers, a company must take the role of visionary enabler.
As an example for all the above we could use Apple + iTunes + iPod + customers. Together they “reinvented music” and disrupted the existing music industry.
Brian
@brandstrat
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NOTE: I’ll be posting more about value co-creation in coming weeks.
Photo: Spiritwood Images – Flickr
