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Trust as a facilitator of co-creation in customer-salesperson interaction – an imperative for the realization of episodic and relational value?

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Abstract

The co-creation of value is one of the key dynamic processes taking place within customer relationships. This paper emphasizes the importance of interaction between the customer and salesperson for the co-creation of value and theorizes how co-creation can be established between these actors through joint exploration of the customer’s value systems and value-generating processes, facilitated by interpersonal trust evolving at different interaction levels. We offer a series of propositions on how co-creation is engendered in all interactions from discrete to relational exchanges and how mutual value is realized from both the customer’s and salesperson’s perspective. The presented framework emphasizes that the actors require different levels of trust to engage in the co-creation of distinct value dimensions ranging from episode to relationship value.

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Notes

  1. The grey line in our conceptual model indicates the possibility that the customer-salesperson interaction terminates after the co-creation of episode value for both actors in a discrete transaction sequence.

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  1. Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

    Jasmin Baumann & Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh

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  1. Jasmin Baumann
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  2. Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh
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Correspondence to Jasmin Baumann.

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Baumann, J., Le Meunier-FitzHugh, K. Trust as a facilitator of co-creation in customer-salesperson interaction – an imperative for the realization of episodic and relational value?. AMS Rev 4, 5–20 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-013-0039-8

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