Conceptualising value co-creation: A journey to the 1970s and back to the future

Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic asserts that firms and customers always co-create value. This article argues that the co-creation of value term, as used by Vargo and Lusch (2008 Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. 2008. Service-Dominant Logic: Continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1): 1–10. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), is strongly metaphorical in its construction, and this metaphoric form acts as a barrier to focused empirical analysis. An alternative conceptualisation is offered. It is argued that value co-creation can be defined as the joint actions by a customer (or another beneficiary) and a service provider during their direct interactions. Value creation in such interactive contexts was studied as early as the 1970s in the early days of modern service marketing research. This article relies on two models from that time to develop a value co-creation logic and a conceptual model of value co-creation as an alternative schema to S-D logic.