数字世界的价值共创:构念、主题与研究展望

Value Co-creation in the Digital World:Key Constructs,Themes and Research Prospects

数字世界的价值共创成为营销领域研究的前沿和热点。从目前的研究成果来看,该领域的研究还处于成长阶段。本文在梳理相关文献的基础上,对数字世界的价值共创研究进展进行了回顾。首先,将数字世界的价值共创视为价值共创在数字世界的延伸,界定了数字世界价值共创的基本概念,重点梳理了价值共创的三个核心维度,即互动、融入和授权在数字世界的新变化。其次,本文在归纳价值共创基本研究框架的基础上,总结了数字世界的价值共创三个重要研究主题,即社交媒体的价值共创、品牌社群的价值共创以及数字世界的价值共创与品牌创建。最后,本文提出了若干研究展望,试图为国内学者开展这方面的研究提供有益的帮助。

Over the past years, the development of information and communication technologies which are pushed by the lnternet, has deeply influenced the ways of value creation, value co-creation has become an increasingly important issue in the digital world and been highly valued by academic circles. However, researches on value co-creation in the digital world are still in infancy and confronted with new problems, concepts and contents. Through summarizing the existing literatures, this paper regards the concept of value co-creation in the digital world as value co-creation extending to the digital world and summarizes its research perspectives, core dimensions and basic research framework. On this basis, this paper systemically sorts out and reviews relevant literatures, defines the concept of value co-creation in the digital world and summarizes the changes in the core dimensions and new research topics. Firstly, this paper not only summarizes three perspectives concerning the concept of value co-creation, namely, experience perspective, service dominant logic perspective and social constructivism perspective but also six core dimensions, say, experience, interaction, engagement, knowledge sharing, consumer empowerment and rela- tionship. Through literature review, We propose that new changes have emerged in the core dimensions of value co- creation in the digital enviroment, including some new elements, such as interactive relationship, value co-creation experience, platform engagement and consumer empowerment. Among them, the authors mainly focus on three dimensions, namely, interaction, engagement and empowerment and compare their differences online and offline. In- teraction evolves from the concept of two-way offline to muhi-way online. The concept of engagement derived from online is different from traditional concept of involvement which mainly derived from offline. Internet technology substantially reduces customer participation costs and improves the extent of consumer empowerment. On the basis of the above analyses, We put forward a new definition for value co-creation in the digital world ： Making use of dig- ital virtual platforms, multi-stakeholders and initiating multi-dimension interactions, through which consumers gain more empowerment and produce a joint agency experience about co-create value. Secondly, this paper summarizes some general research topics related to value creation, that is to say, why customers take participate in value co-creation, how to co-create value and the consequences of value co-creation. Under the framework of general research topics, this paper focuses on some specific research topics about value co- creation in the digital environment, namely, value co-creation in social media, value co-creation in virtual commu- nity and value co-creation and brand building in the digital world. Social media and virtual community have become digital platforms for value co-creation and have a significant impact on its process and results. In addition, the new way of value co-creation has created a new logic for brand building and brand management, even subverting the tra- ditional logic. Branding is interpreted as the process of collective creation and the way of brand management chan- ging from one-way process to multi-way joint agency experience management. The emergence of digital platforms such as social media has a greater impact on brand awareness from the aspect of customers than from the aspect companies, which changes the formation of brand equity. The coordination of storytelling from customers and com- panies is an important issue for digital platform brands. Finally, researches concerning the digital world value-creation are still in infancy, and there is still a lot of space to explore. This paper puts forward three research prospects： the need to explore the black box of value cocreation, which requires a further solution to mechanism of value co-creation etc ; the need to explore the digital co- creation platform, which requires further expansion in the forms and contents of value co-creation on digital plat- forms and the need to rethink the new logic of branding, which requires further attention to the impacts on brand building and brand management from the aspect of value co-creation in the digital environment.