KOREASCHOLAR

The events industry continues to grow and is estimated to be worth around 30 billion dollars yearly involving more than 50 million trips worldwide. MICE (meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions) offer opportunities for business networking, business development and customer loyalty, and are used for internal company purposes as well as for external commercial gain. However, capturing the value of any given MICE appears difficult and relatively little is known about how customers engage in co-creation and there are few models or frameworks. Moreover, dyadic encounter and value from a provider perspective ignore the measurement of customer value in multi-actor service encounters. The research questions posed by this study were therefore: How do multi-actor service encounters differ from dyadic ones? Do current value frameworks capture all the value created in these encounters? And how can multi-actor service providers increase customer value? To address these questions, we embarked on a qualitative study with 35 actors (attendees, organizers, speakers) from networking events, using a service-dominant logic approach to conceptualizing customer perceived value from networking events. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first empirical studies to address the joint creation of value in service encounters characterised by multiple providers (provider network approach) and multiple customers (customer group approach) at the same time and studied from the perspectives of both sides. In answering our first research question of how do multi-actor service encounters different from dyadic ones, we first identify several characteristics that define multi-actor services and compare them to traditional one-to-one services. Our second research question asked whether current value taxonomies capture all the value created in these encounters and we conceptualised the dimensions of event value (social, professional, learning, emotional and hedonic), and show how these relate to existing value taxonomies, as well as highlighting professional value which is new and novel to event encounters. Thirdly, in answering how multi-actor service providers can increase customer value, we supplement previous research on customer value from the providers’ view by adding how the design and execution of service impacts customer value. From this managerial perspective, our study brings new perspectives for event management in understanding when and where value is created and therefore when and how it should be measured. In terms of assessing interaction and engagement, we have found that few practices are in place. We suggest that observation within an event setting could be complemented by video recording.

• Vincent-Wayne Mitchell(City University London)
• Bodo B. Schlegelmilch(WU Vienna)
• Sorina-Diana Mone(Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca)