MARKETING STRATEGY FOR DEMOCRATIZING VALUE CREATION
Abstract
Purpose: This article analyzes the role that marketing has played as a vanguard in initiating the democratization of value creation. In other words the article explains the how marketing strategists propose the value creation concept as a means of integrating the interests of shareholders, the workforce, and that of the stakeholders. Thus, this article claims that the marketing-oriented perspective on value creation proposes a re-conceptualization of the value in use and value in exchange theories, conceptions of the social responsibility of organizations, strategies for increasing social capital, and conceptions of the nature of the agora (initiating a resurgence of the classical notion that the marketplace is a forum for generating social and economic value).
Problem: The literature on value creation has been inadequate in providing a comprehensive explanation of how the value creation concept can be applied in a way that resolves the dichotomy between shareholder value and stakeholder value which is, as well, a reflection of the dichotomy between economic and social value theory. By explaining how the application of the concept (as a business strategy and/or business model) integrates the value-added, the value creation, and the co-creation of value concepts the article indicates how the value creation concept is a multi-dimensional strategy for satisfying all stakeholders.
Design: This article uses the Structuration model of social formation as the theoretical basis for explaining the value creation concept as an integration of the value in exchange (firm-centric) and value in use (customer-centric) perspectives on value theory. An exploratory study is used as a method for analyzing the social-economic impact of the marketing value creation concept (using Sweden—frontrunner in innovation generation and the home of pioneering literature in value creation—as a context for analysis).
Results: The democratization of the value creation concept portrays the market as a public platform where individuals interact to co-create the means for maximizing the satisfaction of material and higher order needs. Because culture itself is increasingly mediated by integrated global commercial networks (which include the impact of commercial media on culture) marketing specialists have undertaken the social responsibility of promoting a Structuration type structure-agent interaction as the means of co-creating social-economic reality.
Conclusions: Marketing has evolved from concentrating on selling concrete products to becoming a relational process for the construction of social reality. Marketing is an aspect of the infrastructure of society that facilitates value (benefit) being determined in the process of co-creation (i.e. shared notions of well-being, meaning, sustainability, survivability, and common goals for maximizing material satisfaction) which the marketing specialists believe is the key to holding social units together (including economic units).
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