According to Ngo and O’Cass (2010), organisations need to define the architecture for the creation of value, this is, engaging in the correct actions. Therefore, organisations require the appropriate strategic positioning and business guidelines that incorporate the leveraging of internal knowledge, skills and resources for the development of processes enabling the integration of customer resources in the co-creation of value (Nenonen & Storbacka, 2010; Payne et al., 2008). The task of marketing becomes that of supporting customer value creation processes (Grönroos & Ravald, 2011; Lusch & Webster, 2011), and organisations are thus facilitators of value and not its creators (Grönroos, 2008, 2011; Storbacka, Frow, Nenonen, & Payne, 2012). When creating interactive contacts with customers during their use of goods and services, the firm develops opportunities to co-create value with them and for them and to influence their value fulfilment (Grönroos, 2008).

Customers are active entities able to co-develop and personalise their relationships with suppliers and adopt a diversified range of different roles and hence their performances depend on the capacity of suppliers to add resources, in terms of their competences and capacities, to the total resource set held by the customer as well as their capacities to influence company customer processes to ensure their ability to utilise the resources available in the most efficient and effective ways (Nuttavuthisit, 2010; Payne et al., 2008; Storbacka et al., 2012).

In order to co-create value, suppliers need to mobilise resources and deploy their capacities in ways susceptible of generating activities for which the resources relevant to the customer mission may be integrated into customer practices (Storbacka et al., 2012).

Companies may complement customer capacities and skills through training and education and thus boosting their scope for co-creation. The greater the level of customer understanding about the opportunities available, the greater the value susceptible to co-creation (Payne et al., 2008). Letting customers complement their skills and knowledge will foster creation practices (Nuttavuthisit, 2010). Through educating customers, companies endow them with the capacities and abilities necessary to co-produce a service (Burton, 2002; Eisingerich & Bell, 2006). Therefore, we arrive at the following hypothesis:H3

The greater the company effort in educating the customer, the greater the co-creation of value undertaken by the customer.

Customer co-creation activities may be divided up into participation and creation (Lusch & Vargo, 2006; Nuttavuthisit, 2010). Participation refers to the cooperation of customers following an invitation issued by the company to become actively involved in the process of creating with the actual actions structured and determined by the company. In turn, creation is, in the main, determined by the customer when becoming proactive in the creation of value through the utilisation of goods. Furthermore, Nuttavuthisit (2010) also proposes that the value gained by the customer from co-creation may also be seen within the framework of how both participation and co-creation stem from the goal of generating benefits whether for oneself or for others (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Sets out the proposed model and hypotheses.

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Hence, while customers participate in company activities with the objective of gaining benefits for themselves, this still draws them in as closely as possible to attaining exactly the goals set, whether lower costs, better adaptation, greater speed of service, higher levels of convenience or greater brand differentiation. In turn, whenever customers engage in creation activities for themselves, these shall complement their capacities and knowledge with the company's own resources and thereby receiving a broader scope of benefits than those resulting from mere participation and extending to psychological benefits such as pleasure and trust in the ability to co-create value for themselves. In both situations the customer seem to derive benefits. However, the relationship between co-creation activities and its consequences needs further empirical development as only few studies have studied this relationship (Grissemann & Stokburger-Sauer, 2012; Vega-Vazquez et al., 2013). Correspondingly, the following hypothesis is stablished:H7

The greater the level of customer co-creation activities, the greater the level of customer perceived benefits.

Since the model involves the study of co-creation as a second order construct, a previous step was carried out in order to transform the second order co-creation construct in a first order construct. The procedure was carried according to the two step approach suggested by Wright, Campbell, Thatcher, and Roberts (2012). The procedure returned adequate values of the measurement model validity either for the reflective and the formative construct. After, the normal procedure recommended by Chin (1998a,1998b) and Hair, Ringle, and Sarstedt (2011) was carried out.

According to the recommendations set out by Chin (1998a,1998b) and Hair et al. (2011), the proposed conceptual model incorporates two different analytical phases. Firstly, we analysed the measurement model in order to verify whether the indicators for each construct were valid and robust for measuring the respective analytical constructs. This involves calculating the composite reliability of each indicator's loadings, the average variance extracted (AVE) and the discriminant validity of the reflective constructs, in this case the constructs for customer education, customer expertise, self-efficacy, bridging social capital and perceived benefits. For the co-creation construct, since it is analysed as a formative construct, we calculate the weight of each construct indicator and their respective statistical significance in conjunction with ascertaining whether or not the results display multicollinearity, as also recommended by Chin (1998a,1998b) and Hair et al. (2011).

Table 1 presents the reflective constructs (customer education, customer expertise, self-efficacy, bridging social capital and perceived benefits) loadings and Table 2 the weights of the co-creation construct alongside the respective level of standard deviation and statistical significance obtained through the Bootstrapping technique with 5000 samples based on the 361 individuals.

As may be observed from Table 2, all the reflective construct loadings return results in excess of 0.7 and hence in keeping with the recommendations from Hair, Anderson, Tatham, and Black (1998). As regards the co-creation construct, we found that all the weights attain significance enabling us to continue with the analysis.

In continuing with our analysis of the measurement model's validity, Table 3 reports the composite reliability and the average variance extracted (AVE) for the reflective constructs.

As Table 3 shows, all the reflective constructs return composite reliability results above the 0.7 minimum recommended by Bagozzi and Yi (1988), as well as AVE results equal to or better than 0.5, the minimum value recommended by Bagozzi and Yi (1988).

Table 4 furthermore sets out how the reflective constructs attain discriminant validity as all constructs return average variance extracted results higher than the squared correlation between the constructs (Squared correlation with any other construct) as recommended by Fornell and Laker (1981). This validity test shows that common method bias is not a problem in accordance to what is suggested by Conway and Lance (2010). We furthermore find that no construct reports loadings greater than those returned by the construct itself (table not included) (Chin, 1998b).

To finalise measurement model validity, we proceeded by analysing the multicollinearity of the indicators for the co-creation construct (participation behaviour and citizenship behaviour) and thereby verifying that they all report values equal to or lower than 1, and hence within the recommendations set out by Hair, Sarstedt, Ringle, and Mena (2012).

Having tested model validity, we then analysed the model's structure involving analysis of the model's (R2) explicative capacity and the statistical significance of the diverse structural coefficients (Hair et al., 1998).

We may correspondingly observe from Fig. 2 how the model explains 50.1% of the variance in the co-creation construct and how 26% of the customer expertise construct variance is explained by its preceding construct (customer education) in addition to how 34% of variance in the self-efficacy construct is attributable to its precedents (customer expertise and bridging social capital). We also verify that 33% of the variance in perceived benefits is explained by co-creation activities. According to Hair et al. (1998), there are no set reference values for the explained variance percentages as such depend on the research context. Table 5 details the statistical significance of the diverse structural coefficients after having carried out validation by applying the Bootstrapping technique with 5000 samples provided by the 361 individuals.

Fig. 2.

Displays this structural model.

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As the results in Table 5 demonstrate, all the coefficient paths are significant to the level of 0.05, given the t values are above 1.96. Furthermore, we do also verify that all path coefficients are robust as they all are above 0.2, the minimum value recommended by Chin (1998b). Hence, we calculated the total effects with the results correspondingly set out in Table 6.

Through analysis of the total effects (Table 6), we may conclude that operant resources, in the form of self-efficacy and customer expertise do influence customer co-creation activities (0.30 and 0.34 respectively), thus supporting H1 and H5. On what concerns the relationship between self-efficacy and the other customer resources, customer expertise and bridging social capital, we verify that bridging social capital is capable of influencing the customer perception of self-efficacy by 0.4, thus providing support to H2 and that customer expertise is also capable of influencing the perception of self-efficacy on 0.31, thus providing support to H6. It is also important to highlight the strong influence of customer education, whether directly impacting on co-creation (0.53) or indirectly shaping customer expertise (0.50), thus supporting H3 and H4. Finally, it is possible to stablish a high direct impact of co-creation on perceived benefits (0.58) as expected through H7.

According to Gummesson and Mele (2010), the level of co-creation undertaken by customers depends on the extent to which their operant resources are integrated. The results of this study in fact demonstrate how individual resources, formalised in terms of self-efficacy, social capital and customer expertise, do contribute to explaining the variance in the co-creation activities engaged in by customers as well as how from these co-creation activities customer do perceived higher levels of benefits. We verified that Hypotheses 1 and 5, which establish a direct influence between the perception of self-efficacy and customer expertise on co-creation, respectively, are confirmed. We also report that the influence of bridging social capital construct on the perception of self-efficacy is significant and thus proving a relevant indirect influence on co-creation as theoretically proposed by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998), Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), Coleman (1988), Lin (1999), Tsai and Ghoshal (1998) and Chiu et al. (2006).

Furthermore, we also verified that these individual resources receive a boost when companies provide their customers with education and training and thereby confirming Hypotheses 3 and 4 that, respectively, propose there is a direct relationship between customer education practices and co-creation activities and also with customer expertise. As proposed by Payne et al. (2008), Nenonen and Storbacka (2010), companies play an important role in facilitating the integration of customer held resources and should correspondingly establish processes that aid this facilitation role and thereby turn themselves genuine facilitators in the creation of value (Grönroos, 2008; Grönroos & Voima, 2013; Storbacka et al., 2012). Companies should hence not limit their expectations to making value proposals but should actively assist customer based value creation (Grönroos & Voima, 2013). In fact, this study advocates that company customer education may significantly raise customer expertise (0.505) and, in turn, this goes onto influence the perception of self-efficacy to a considerable extent (0.313). As Burton (2002) and Eisingerich and Bell (2006) state, through educating their customers, companies are able to raise customer capacities and abilities in co-producing a service and hence also in co-creating. Another important relationship that found support in this study is the relationship between co-creation activities with the company and the perceived benefits by the customer. This relationship is in fact the stronger path found in this study, thus supporting the idea proposed by Nuttavuthisit (2010) that co-creation activities will bring benefits to the costumer.

Based on these results firms need to be aware that one of the factors that can enhance customer co-creation activities with the firm is the perception customers have about their skills and capabilities. In this sense, companies should focus on providing resources that can enhance customers’ resources like does Nike through the Nike+ (NikePlus) platform (Ramaswamy, 2008) where customers gain new resources by gaining information on the best routes to exercise, how to enhance their performance and avoid injuries. Furthermore, this perception of self-efficacy is augmented by bridging social capital, the social capital that goes beyond family and friends, and that can bring access to new information. Therefore, firms must design strategies to improve their customers bridging social capital, by for instance providing possible connections between customers or even between customers and experts, through for instance on-line forums. Also, firms must realise that their effort to providing the customer with information about the pros and cons as well as the service works can enhance the customer knowledge on how to deal with the service rendering (customer expertise) and consequently enhance his perceptions of self-efficacy and ultimately his co-creation level. Finally, firms must be conscious that all the efforts and contribution in rising the customer level of co-creation will certainly bring benefits to the firm as customer do perceived higher levels of benefits, such as higher quality services, personalised services, less service failures, more pleasant interactions as well as special treatment, when co-creating with the company.

The objectives of this study centred on understanding the influences of customer operant resources, operationalised through customer perceptions of their self-efficacy, their bridging social capital and the respective level of customer expertise, on their co-creation activities with companies. While the operant resources of a customer extend beyond these three concepts, their operational application did enable the verification of how these positively influence customer co-creation of value activities. This study also enabled us to ascertain that these resources may be enhanced and leveraged through companies educating their customers and that this process of conveying information and similar such acts in practice serves as one of the factors that best explains variations in co-creation whether directly or indirectly through increasing customer capacities to deal with processes inherent to the service (customer expertise). Therefore, we are also in a position to maintain that companies should seek to foster value creation processes among their customers whether at the point in time of service provision or through the interactions ongoing with customers, for example, through recourse to the Internet, and always strive to best understand just which inhibitions and motivations are experienced by customers and the ways in which they act in order to be best positioned to supply the education necessary to driving the potential of their resources.

This is even more important when we verified the great impact co-creation activities have on customers perceived benefits as for each unit increase in co-creation we can expect a rise of 0.58 in perceived benefits. Thus, companies should prioritise accompanying and monitoring customer processes in order to prepare their own processes and service provision mechanisms able to support the co-creation of value. It would seem that customers with greater resource levels are able to co-create more with companies. However, to attain this, companies need to leverage these resources through educating their customers about their services.

This study contributes to the S-D Logic approach by proposing a way to operationalise the customer operant resources through the perception of self-efficacy and by demonstrating how this construct is related with co-creation. Also, this study supports the notion that if firms work to enhance their customers operant resources they will be able to co-create more with the company and perceive higher levels of benefits that ultimately will contribute to enhance the firm resources.