Co-creating educational consumer journeys: A sensemaking perspective

Michael B. Beverland (), Pınar Cankurtaran (), Pietro Micheli () and Sarah JS Wilner ()
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Michael B. Beverland: University of Sussex Business School and Copenhagen Business School
Pınar Cankurtaran: Delft University of Technology
Pietro Micheli: University of Warwick
Sarah JS Wilner: Wilfrid Laurier University

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2024, vol. 52, issue 2, No 2, 284-305

Abstract: Abstract To date, customer education has been framed in terms of one-way information provision, at odds with much of the literature on meaning co-creation. Drawing on an ethnography of a specialty coffee purveyor, we show how staff and consumers co-create educational consumer journeys through the deployment of seven practices: auditing, realignment, marrying competing logics, negotiating scripts, evangelizing, expanding collective knowledge, and impression management. These practices require staff and consumers to enact three different educational roles (educator, student, and peer), which are necessary for the co-creation and extension of consumer journeys. The roles, practices and the journeys themselves emerge iteratively through sensebreaking, sensegiving, and sensemaking processes among staff, consumers and the servicescape. Our findings frame customer education as a dynamic process in which meaning is co-created between participants. Furthermore, the cues and touchpoints needed for meaning-making shift as power relations between participants change. Managerially, these findings highlight the potential of co-created educational consumer journeys to expand established market categories.

Keywords: Consumer journeys; Customer education; Co-creation; Sensemaking; Practice theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s11747-023-00951-5

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