Brand Together: How Co‐Creation Generates Innovation and Re‐energizes Brands

Citation

Sigala, M. (2013), "Brand Together: How Co‐Creation Generates Innovation and Re‐energizes Brands", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 95-95. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421311298759

Innovation is both a survival and competitive necessity for firms. Moreover, current technological advances and market trends empower customers to co‐create but also demand to consume their personalised product and service experiences. Co‐creation is a very timely topic concerning all organisations and sectors, which is advocated from many perspectives including open innovation, service‐dominant‐logic, crowdsourcing and participative innovation (Sigala, 2012). In this vein, this book aims to analyse the design and the implementation of co‐creation strategies from a brand innovation perspective. To achieve that, the book adopts a human‐centric approach showing how people can enable their dreams and aspirations by getting involved in the generation, development, and implementation of the services and products that they consume in their daily lives. Arguments are illustrated by identifying and analysing several international case studies and examples of co‐creation. The book does not only argue the benefits and the ways to implement co‐creation, but it also presents the use of several tools of co‐creation as well as the structural and cultural implications of participative innovation.

The book is written by three leading authors in the field, namely Nicholas Ind, Clare Fuller, and Charles Trevail, and it features ten chapters. All chapters provide a mixture of a critical review of the related literature as well as explain numerous examples demonstrating the implication of theory in practice. The book is reader‐friendly (demonstrated in its writing style and language), and its chapters are structured into two parts: the first part, including the first three chapters, focuses on the philosophical debates, while the following chapters included in the second part explain the implementation process of co‐creation.

Analytically, the first chapter analyses the vagueness and the conceptualisation of co‐creation by specifying its key ingredients, namely participation, openness, empowerment, and organisational involvement. In chapter 2, the book demonstrates how innovation must be connected to the brand and how the co‐creation process and outcomes can push the innovation limits of new service and product ideas. Chapter 3 covers the different approaches to co‐creation from those organisations that have embraced it, to the experimenters and the rejectors, who lack the will and the capability to use co‐creation for connecting with the consumers.

Chapter 4 explains the first stage of the co‐creation implementation process, showing how to build trust and commitment amongst customers for enabling and engaging them in innovation processes. Chapter 5 continues by analysing how to set up a co‐creation strategy, its aims and objectives, as well as its programme. This chapter also demonstrates the different benefits and ways to implement online and live co‐creation activities. Chapter 6 investigates people's motivations and factors influencing their participation in co‐creation, and it then exemplifies how to build a social environment that can provide an opportunity to everyone to be engaged with innovation.

Chapter 7 continues by discussing the usefulness and design of toolkits for enabling customers to participate in co‐creation. The design of toolkits can critically influence the creativity and level of customer participation. Chapter 8 analyses the benefits of opening up the funnel of innovation to other stakeholders including partners, employees and citizens, and it uses several cases showing how to foster and instil such an open innovation culture and environment. Chapter 9 focuses on identifying and measuring the benefits of co‐creation, namely firms' performance and innovation benefits and value of customer closeness and brand value. Finally, chapter 10 provides a nice summary of the book's major arguments by introducing five main questions that firms have to answer: What is co‐creation for? Who is involved? How should it be managed? How can it best be rewarded? What are the limitations of co‐creation?

Overall, this is an easy‐to‐read book that provides a rich set of both theoretical background and industry experience on why and how to implement co‐creation brand innovation. The book nicely integrates theoretical concepts with practical evidence gathered through a wide spectrum of international case studies and thorough literature reviews. Overall, the book provides a good and holistic overview of the theme of co‐creation. The book can be further enhanced by elaborating more on the role of social media and user‐generated‐content on participative innovation, but these issues require in‐depth discussion and specialized analyses so, that it is better that they constitute the single topic of another book. The book constitutes a very useful reading for researchers‐academics, high‐level students and professionals involved and interested in co‐creation.