In the light of co-creation activities, the post-consumption phase gains particular importance. Similar to the “I designed it myself”-effect discussed by Franke, Schreier, and Kaiser (2010), customers get the feeling of being responsible for their successful holiday experience, which results in feelings of accomplishment and increased loyalty intentions. When customers return from their holiday trip, they frequently share their holiday experiences with friends and relevant others by uploading pictures on social networks such as Facebook or by writing reviews on online recommendation websites.
In doing so, they create hedonic and social value for themselves but also for potential other customers. The post-consumption phase can be utilized by the customer to further engage in online communities and to reveal personal travel experiences. The hotel manager on the other hand should also try to stretch the co-creation process, for example, by inviting guests to engage in online communities. This makes customers reminisce about their holiday and gives the manager the possibility to build up an emotional relationship.
Also the nature of innovations change as firms can and should integrate the customer as an operant resource and use their skills and knowledge. By doing so, firms shift from production innovation to experience innovation. To enable such an innovation process to take place, the firm has to provide a platform for the customer that allows him or her to give his or her fancy full scope and create individual experiences (Prahalad, 2006).
When giving customers the opportunity to create their own experiences and when they are willing to participate, diversification can be facilitated or even new markets discovered (Prahalad, 2006). For the customer, engaging in the co-creation process means to invest time and knowledge. Customers will be ready to invest in their
resources when they gain psychological or monetary advantages. Skills and knowledge of the customer can be seen as an essential external resource for hotel managers. In some cases, customers are aware of their knowledge and the contribution they can make but often it is tacit knowledge which first needs to be extracted and further translated into action. The difficulty is the nature of tacit knowledge as it refers to “all intellectual capital or physical capabilities and skills that the individual cannot fully articulate, represent or codify (Hallin & Marnburg, 2008, p. 368).” Consequently, practitioners’
challenge is to find ways of how to capture and exploit tacit knowledge. A possibility to obtain tacit knowledge from guests could be the organization of focus groups with selected key clients. Through lively and open discussions valuable explicit and implicit knowledge could be generated and further translated into action (Shaw et al., 2010).
Furthermore, the establishment of an online community could be of great interest and importance—a community, in which only former hotel guests can become members.
Generally, “through online community, companies can extend their customer
relationship management initiatives to include interactions among customers, leveraging these interactions to attract and retain more customers, convert browsers to buyers, improve customer service, reduce support costs, increase revenue, and gain additional
insight into their business (Wang & Fesenmaier, 2004, p. 710).” Within this social community, customers can exchange their holiday experiences, share precious
information, point out critique, make suggestions on how to improve certain services, pinpoint services and amenities which are desirable but not offered by the hotel, and even make proposals for innovative ideas. Following the concept of social value, members of the community should feel like belonging to a special group together with people who share common interests and values. Guests who are participating should be rewarded with special offers, small presents, or vouchers. All these proactive
approaches could help in establishing a broad community which is characterized by loyalty, satisfaction, progress and innovation.
Though, some customers are happy to engage in co-creation activities and others are not (Etgar, 2008). This might be a result of the presence or absence of
psychological drivers. Moreover, the decision whether to engage in co-creation activities is also affected by a rational way of thinking. In most cases, customers participate in co-creation for their own benefit. Therefore, it is a manager’s duty to provide sufficient information about the co-creation activities, which makes the customer aware of the benefits he is able to generate. The success of co-creation—
whether it helps to uncover customers’ needs and wants or accelerates the innovation rate—is always highly dependent on customers’ commitment to actively participate in the co-creation process. Due to this fact customer and supplier (and possibly also other actors) are strongly interrelated, which leads to powerful trust and relationship
building. As such, managers need to broaden their view on the innovation process. Due to the fact that the customer is always a co-creator of value (Vargo & Lusch, 2006) innovations either improve existing customers’ value creation function or create new markets by making value propositions to non-customers (Michel et al., 2008). Within S-D logic, operant resources are a fundamental unit of exchange (Vargo & Lusch, 2004).
But not only the available skills and knowledge from customers can contribute to innovations in the co-creation process but the knowledge transfer of all network
partners is of high importance (Michel et al., 2008). Consequently, managers will need to collect, maintain, improve, and efficiently exploit all skills and knowledge available in their network system.
To conclude, this article aimed to provide the theoretical foundations of customer co-creation of value with regard to implications for tourism and hospitality
management. Customers engage in value creating activities in various ways such as participation-for-self, creation-for-self, participation-for-others, or creation-for-others.
The tourism industry can gain from these practices in form of increased spending behaviour, loyalty intentions, or positive word of mouth. Moreover, these value creating activities can take place in the pre-consumption stage, the consumption stage and the post-consumption stage. There clearly is considerable potential within the tourism industry when adopting a S-D logic perspective in a wide scope. In order to do
so practitioners need to free their mind from a G-D mind-set, which they might not follow with intention but in a rather unconscious way. Nevertheless, the leading thought behind S-D logic might be a chance to push tourism into new and exciting directions.
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Roman Egger, Igor Gula and Dominik Walcher (eds.), Open Tourism, Tourism on the Verge, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-54089-9_4
(1) (2) (3)
IT-Enabled Value Co-creation in a Tourism Context: The Portale Sardegna Case
Francesca Cabiddu
1, Tsz-Wai Lui
2and Gabriele Piccoli
3Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Ming Chaun University, Taipei, Taiwan
Università di Pavia, Pavia, Italy
Francesca Cabiddu (Corresponding author) Email: fcabiddu@unica.it
Tsz-Wai Lui
Email: irislui@mail.mcu.edu.tw Gabriele Piccoli
Email: gabriele.piccoli@unipv.it
Keywords IT-enabled value co-creation – Theory building – Service-dominant logic – Strategic fit – Synergy – Process alignment – Partner readiness – Information
technology – Information technology – Inter-organizational context
1 Introduction
The value of information technology (IT) in a business’s production process is still a highly debated issue among researchers. Most studies on business value have
considered IT value from the individual firm perspective, which assume that IT investment by a single firm leads to value-creation for that firm (e.g., Hitt &
Brynjolfsson, 1996). However, recent research has highlighted the importance of
studying IT value beyond the level of individual firms and has developed the concept of IT-enabled co-creation value. This concept derives from the awareness that
organizational boundaries are increasingly permeable and that emerging novel arrangements enable previously unattainable value propositions (Kohli & Grover, 2008). In particular, the co-creation of value is seen as occurring through the joint, voluntary actions of multiple parties, which include value network partners, customers, and even competitors (Kohli & Grover, 2008). Despite the importance of this subject, few studies have attempted to understand how IT-based value is co-created and shared among multiple partners (Sharaf, Langdon, & Gosain, 2007). Multi-firm IT
implementations generally have been considered in the context of transactions in inter-organizational systems (Gebauer & Buxmann, 1999) or outsourcing arrangements (Dos Santos, 2003) in which the value research has focused primarily on how each firm benefits from such relationships. To address this gap, this study contains an analysis of the role played by IT in terms of value co-creation (Vargo & Lusch, 2004; 2008a, 2008b). The study examines how different companies with different ITs can join together and co-create value. It also explains why some companies can successfully capture more of the value co-created in the partnership while others are less successful.
The setting is the tourism industry because it is inevitably influenced by IT and no player can escape its impacts (Werthner & Klein, 1999). The rapid development of both supply and demand makes IT an imperative for hospitality firms; they must rethink the ways in which they do business to satisfy tourism demands and survive in the long term (Buhalis, 1998).
We conducted an in-depth case study of an online tour operator (Portale Sardegna), which represents a remarkable case of travel innovation. Our objective was to
demonstrate why comparable hotels showed different abilities in appropriating of value co-created. First, we investigate how customers and firms co-create value. Second, we explore why some organizations successfully capture a portion of the value co-created while others fail to do so.
The article is organized as follows: First, a review of the literature on Service-Dominant logic and IT-based value co-creation; second, an outline of the methodology and details about data collection; and finally, the presentation of the data analysis, discussion of results, managerial implications and concluding remarks.