Customer benefits and value co-creation activities in corporate social networking services

Despite the growing importance of customers as value co-creators, little is known about their reasons for voluntarily participating in value co-creation activities. Based on expectancy-value theory, this paper empirically examines the specific benefits that customers anticipate from engaging in certain co-creation activities. Furthermore, it examines the manner in which interactions between customer benefits and joint activities/industry types influence customers’ intentions to continuously engage in value co-creation in the context of corporate social networking service (SNS)-based virtual customer environments (VCEs). Study data were collected from 327 corporate Facebook and Twitter VCE users through an online panel survey. Results of the main effect relationships reveal that all three customer benefits – cognitive, social integrative, and hedonic – significantly impacted customer intentions to continuously participate in value co-creation. Furthermore, the benefit–intention relationships differed depending upon the type of co-creation activities (e.g. ideation, design, testing, support, and marketing) and industry characteristics. Theoretical discussions about these results are provided, and implications for future research and practice are presented.