Contemporary consumer activism in catalysing and channeling intellectual resources, affective labor and extraordinary expressive and productive abilities is subverting the company-driven logics traditionally associated to market formation and entrepreneurial development. Consumers, enabled by networked platforms, are increasingly engaging in the creation of new business models that impact the world of brands.
Traditionally studies on market formation and dynamics focused on companies as the main agents responsible for the creation of new markets. In contrast with this view, current streams of thought (see for instance Peñaloza & Venkatesh, 2006, Schouten et al., 2016; Venkatesh, Peñaloza, & Firat, 2006) suggest that markets are socially constructed, and marketers and consumers co-create the marketplace.

Nowadays consumers are able to co-create and self-produce both symbolic contents and tangible outputs (Campbell, 2005; Cova, Dalli, & Zwick, 2011; Merz, He, & Vargo, 2009; Ritzer, 2014). Through these activities consumers and consumer collectives may foster the emergence of new creative practices and innovations (Thomas, Price, & Schau, 2013; Arnould, 2014) and new products (Martin & Schouten, 2014).

Research on market system dynamics (Giesler & Fischer, 2016) highlights how consumers not only possess the capacity to affect market trajectories, but also may play a role in envisioning and creating new markets (Arvidsson, 2008; Geiger, Kjellberg, & Spencer, 2012; Scaraboto, 2015; Biraghi, Gambetti & Pace, 2018a). In addition to the role of consumers as modifiers of an existing market offer, the new role of unconventional consumer-entrepreneurs (Cova & Guercini, 2018) is currently emerging and affecting (or even creating new) marketplaces beyond the modification of existing products (see for instance Biraghi, Gambetti & Pace, 2018b; Ashman, Patterson & Brown, 2018; Pedeliento et al., 2018; Mardon, Molesworth & Grigore, 2018; Milanesi, 2018).

This increasing entrepreneurial fervor is raising new challenges to the world of brands and branding: what role can traditional brands play in this evolving scenario? Which new brands are emerging? How are the relationships between consumer-entrepreneurs and brands reconfiguring? Which new business models are the new consumer entrepreneurs creating? How are the new consumer entrepreneurs-asbrands building and managing their bond and influence on other consumers?

These questions represent the starting point for our workshop and upcoming special issue of Mercati e Competitività to revisit the concept and the role of brand and branding in light of the emergence of new forms of consumer-entrepreneurship. This on the background of the big cultural changes related to the progressive emergence of social phenomena such as liquid and accelerated society, network society, networked individualism, technocapitalism, and the reconfiguring of the agency among consumers, brands and objects.

- Bernard Cova, Kedge Business School, Marseille.

 

Scholars who wish to present a paper at the workshop are invited to submit an extended abstract in English of 750-1000 words to: rossella.gambetti@unicatt.it; silvia.biraghi@unicatt.it; federica.ceccotti@uniroma1.it no later than April 5, 2019. Authors will be notified of the outcome of the selection process by April 15, 2019.

 

Mercati e Competitività will announce a call for papers for a special issue on this topic. With this workshop the scientific committee aims to stimulate interest in the special issue, spark  intellectual exchange on the topic, generate debate and provide feedback to prospective authors who may consider submitting a paper to this special issue.

 

The academic program will start in the morning at 10.00 and end in the afternoon, approximately at 16.00. Professor Bernard Cova, who is an academic pioneer and has conducted groundbreaking research on this topic, will give a keynote speech to introduce the workshop. Then the selected extended abstracts among the ones proposed to the scientific committee will be presented with a power point presentation and then discussed with the other workshop participants for about 30 minutes (20 minute presentation + 10 minutes Q&A).

 

Despite the long and deep range of works devoted to this domain, there is a wide diversity and range of meanings attached to the concept of experience, causing a lack of universal consensus on its definition. Indeed, the word “experience” is among the most used and misused in marketing literature, and a need of framing what experience is and how it can be defined still remains. Furthermore, no single model of experiential consumption has emerged (Titz, 2007). Hence, there is still an interest for further research aimed at framing and delimiting what the "consumption experience” is and how it relates to other notions, such as brand experience (Andreini et al., 2018; Brakus et al., 2009), or service experience (Blocker & Barrios, 2015). 

 

Customer experience is related to other main and pivotal contemporary topics that this special issue is meant to cover, such as consumer value and value co-creation. 

 

Consumer value has been considered at the very heart of any experiential approach to consumer behaviour (Holbrook, 1999; Wu & Liang, 2009). Albeit, understanding the process of creating and attributing value has interested a relevant number of scholars, who have long agreed on a lack of consistency concerning the nature of value, its characteristics and its conceptualisation and measurement. Although authors recognise that service value is multidimensional, there is no consensus on the number of types or on the criteria for classifying and assessing them. Recently, Gallarza et al. (2017) carried out, proposed and validated a third-order value model in the hotel sector that captures the resulting eight value types (efficiency, excellence, play, aesthetics, status, esteem, ethics, and escapism as an adaptation of spirituality). The case-specific nature of this research (i.e. set in the hotel sector) calls for future adaptations and replications of this higher-order structure in different service settings. Longitudinal studies might be also useful to capture the dynamics of the industry, demand and society and to further advance the knowledge of processes and interaction in the context of experience consumption. Recently, academicians have started to investigate how experience/service consumption can contribute to positively influence the lives and well-being of individuals (Anderson & Ostrom, 2015). In this strand of research (i.e. transformative service research), a “new” type of value (i.e. transformative value) is considered to acknowledge the “social dimension of value creation that generates uplifting change for greater well-being among individuals and collectives” (Blocker & Barrios, 2015, p. 1). In tourism-related literature, transformative value has been considered as what the travellers can gain from travel experiences in term of reconsidering the personal value system as opposed to others’ (Kirillova et al., 2017a, 2017b), and therefore digging knowledge on the multidimensional customer experience in terms of building or renewing the self, learning, opening one’s mind, fostering understanding, enrichment, growth, and development (Reisinger, 2013). In current literature, this “new” value has been mainly theoretically conceptualised and qualitatively investigated. Future research could propose studies attempting to develop and validate scales to measure it and/or consider it alongside other types of value when quantitatively investigating the influence of different value types on satisfaction, memorability and behavioural intentions. 

Research investigating experiences usually takes a process and/or an outcome-based perspective (Lin & Kuo, 2016), and underlines that one of the major challenges in developing an exceptional and memorable experience is to create a connection among different offline and online touchpoints within the customer journey (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016; Voorhees et al., 2017). This calls for further developing the existing theoretical and empirical knowledge (e.g. Barwitz & Maas, 2018; Kranzbuhler et al., 2017) about how the consumer experience can be designed and lived in multichannel decision-making settings (e.g. retailing, tourism, hospitality and leisure). 

 

All that said, and without limiting the scope of the papers to be submitted, this special issue welcomes original empirical or analytical work related to the following topics: