Research on customer engagement behavior such as co-creation activities has recently been one of the top research priorities in marketing and tourism research (Marketing Science Institute, 2010; Shaw, Bailey, & Williams, 2011; Verhoef, Reinartz, & Krafft, 2010). Basically, companies can reach two significant sources of competitive advantage when successfully implementing co-creation activities (Hoyer, Chandy, Dorotic, Krafft, & Singh, 2010): First, they can realize productivity gains through efficiency, such as speed to the market ( Carbonell, Rodríguez-Escudero, & Pujari, 2009), lower costs and reduced risk ( Bendapudi & Berry, 1997; Bendapudi & Leone, 2003; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Second, they can reach gains in the effectiveness of the co-created offering such as increased willingness to pay ( Chung, Kyle, Petric, & Absher, 2011; Franke, Keinz, & Steger, 2009), increased revenues and profits ( Ostrom et al., 2010), or innovativeness ( Füller, Matzler, & Hoppe, 2008).
In the tourism context, the concept of co-creation is particularly relevant. First, offering unique and memorable customer experiences are of paramount importance for tourism service providers in order to remain competitive. Creating a unique experience involves both customer participation and a connection which links the customer to the experience (Pine & Gilmore, 1998; Shaw et al., 2011).
Service-Dominant (S-D) logic elaborates on this perspective and gives priority to the interaction between the company and the customer. This logic implies that value occurs in the interaction process itself rather than exclusively in the provision of the service (Etgar, 2008; Grönroos, 1997). Therefore, involving customers in the creation of a travel arrangement helps tailoring the service to the customers' particular needs and hence assists in creating a unique experience.
Second, the Internet has significantly changed the way customers allocate knowledge about hotels, flights or even destinations. New information and communication technologies, such as online booking engines, have transformed the structure of the tourism distribution system into a multi-channel network that raises new challenges for both customers and tourism companies (e.g., travel agencies). Customers now face more technologically complex purchasing processes and time-consuming price-comparisons due to the partly absence of human interaction. Travel agencies, on the other side, have to face a “re-intermediation process,” which means that they have to reassert their intermediary role by enhancing human interaction and consumer trust (Kracht & Wang, 2010). Increased co-creation activities are thus believed to encourage re-intermediation as they enable travel agencies to provide travel arrangements tailored to each customer's individual needs.
Third, customers create value not only for themselves and the company, but also for other customers which is due to the fact that they often share their travel experiences in online social networks. This development has shifted considerable power to customers. Online communities operate as permanent agents of quality control and instantly report the shortcomings of service companies in online platforms. Online booking engines and websites that allow customers to post their opinions and reviews about tourism service companies are not only a helpful co-creation tool for customers, but also an important source of marketing information about customer experiences for companies (Shaw et al., 2011; Wang & Fesenmaier, 2004). Thus, the travel experience of a single customer is accessible to multitudinous community members and, subsequently, shapes their future purchase behavior.
Nevertheless, empirical evidence of co-creation research in tourism is scarce and a number of research questions are still unanswered. Shaw et al. (2011) were among the first to empirically assess the concept of S-D logic and its implications for tourism management in a hospitality setting. Li and Petrick (2008) conceptually looked into the importance of S-D logic for tourism marketing. Both studies emphasize that S-D logic and co-creation activities deserve further examination in tourism marketing and management. Research is called for that, for instance, investigates the effects of co-creation on company success outcomes such as increased revenues and profitability (Hoyer et al., 2010). Additionally, more research should be devoted to the drivers of co-creation activities in terms of firm actions and processes (vanDoorn et al., 2010).
In this research, we follow up on calls for further research on customer co-creation and investigate both theoretically and empirically a model of antecedents and consequences of customer co-creation in tourism services. We examine company support as one selected driver of co-creation, and customer loyalty and customer expenditures as selected outcomes of co-creation. Specifically, the present paper has three main objectives. First, it develops a deeper understanding of company support in the co-creation process, that is, we study whether increased company support enhances the degree of co-creation. Second, it examines the effect of customer co-creation on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and company performance. In particular, we want to find out if a higher degree of co-creation actually increases satisfaction with and customer loyalty toward the service company and customer expenditures. Third, it investigates if customers' satisfaction with their own co-creation performance plays a moderating role in the relationship between co-creation and satisfaction with the service company and service expenditures, respectively.
