NFTs are touted as revolutionary to market and monetize digital assets. However, critics have questioned NFT value, labeling it as fraudulent. Despite mixed reviews, various firms are leveraging NFTs as a value proposition for customers. In this study, using service-dominant (S-D) logic, we explore how NFTs can help firms in value co-creation and service exchange. We propose and test a conceptual framework using a multi-method approach -1) we investigate NFTs popularity using historical news articles spanning ten years, 2) we use a case study to examine business NFT use in value co-creation and service exchange, subsequently, proposing a conceptual framework illustrating such value exchange, 3) we test our conceptual framework by analyzing data from multiple sources, including surveys, online forums, social media, and transactions. Results from our study, provide business valuable insight into using NFTs as value co-creation and service exchange tool.
This paper examines the co-creation of human brands identities exemplified by celebrities in a stakeholder-actor approach. By bringing together the theoretical web of service-dominant logic, stakeholder theory, actor-network theory, and consumer culture theory, we argue that human brand identities are co-created by multiple stakeholder-actors that have resources and incentives in the activities that make a up an enterprise of a human brand, including the celebrities themselves, consumer-fans, and business entities. By utilizing an observational, archival netnographic data from popular social media channels, four exemplars of celebrity identities from the Philippines demonstrate the co-creation of human brands. Findings illustrate key stakeholder-actors’ participations, production and consumption, and integrations of resources and incentives in the co-creation process as articulated in social media. The co-creation process happens through sociological translations codes namely: social construction and negotiation of identities, parasocialization, influence projection, legitimization, and utilization of human brand identities. These dynamics of human brand identity advance a stakeholder-actor paradigm of service co-creation that is adaptive to the predominant consumer culture and human ideals that surround the celebrity. Implications and future research on celebrity brand marketing management are discussed.
Partnerships have become an important research topic. However, the amount of empirical attention devoted to determining how firms intensively co-produce with alliance partners to improve their innovation performance is lacking. In response to the growing importance of co-production in the partnerships, this study addresses how firms integrate their alliance partners as co-creators into the innovation process. Specifically, this study not only integrates the three dimensions of social capital and examines their separate effects on co-production but also incorporates the roles of absorptive capacity and self-efficacy and investigates their influences on innovation. That is, co-production may operate through absorptive capacity and self-efficacy to increase innovation because knowledge is exchanged and utilized and firms are willing to select challenging goals and remain firmly committed to fulfill them within the network. The proposed model is tested with a structural equation model(SEM). Findings indicate positive relationships between social capital and co-production. Moreover, co-production has positive effects on innovation, absorptive capacity, and self-efficacy. Absorptive capacity and self-efficacy enhance innovation. As such, we suggest that co-production should be considered explicitly in the management of a partnership and should be developed through mentioned above platform, encouraging and enabling both parties to work together for the implementation of innovation.