Levels of co-creation – How sustainable fashion companies create value with their customers
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Authors
Date
2022
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Marketing
Language
en
Pages
83 + 20
Series
Abstract
The fashion industry creates a large amount of sustainability issues, which has generated novel business ideas promoting fashion sustainability in different forms. Also, the consumers are aware of the social and environmental challenges in the fashion industry. The literature around business models and sustainable business models have expressed the importance of the customer involvement in business model operations, leading to a need for customer co-creation practices within sustainable companies and sustainable fashion companies. Although the customer co-creation literature is extensive and has been researched within fashion companies and sustainability, the literature connecting sustainable fashion companies and their co-creation practices seems nonexistent at the moment. The purpose of this study is to examine the co-creation practices through which sustainable fashion companies are creating value in collaboration with their customers. Additionally, the benefits and positive outcomes as well as the barriers of co-creation are analyzed and interpreted. This research uses qualitative research methods, including interviews of five Finnish SME fashion companies aiming for sustainability in their business model decisions. The data analysis utilizes thematic analysis, including coding, categorization, and thematization of the transcribed interview data. The thematic analysis reveals the co-creation of sustainable fashion companies to be executed at three levels depending on the required customer involvement: high, medium, and low involvement co-creations. Each level of co-creation includes various concrete co-creation practices identified in the case company interviews. These co-creation practices at each co-creation level are used for different objectives including customer relationships, brand value, revenues, and innovations. The identified barriers contain obstacles from customers’ side (e.g., effort, fear of commitment, lack of knowledge), company’s limits (resources and company size), and fashion industry-wide difficulties (e.g., seasonality, variety in customer needs, conflict of interest between the company and the customers). The study shows that sustainable fashion companies implement and utilize co-creation practices with the customers at various stages of the economic, environmental, and social levels of their business models. The sustainable fashion companies are concluded to use co-creation mostly for traditional business objectives, but the co-creation practices result also in most of the actions to sustainability, either as an additional objective or an outcome of the co-creation practice. Thus, sustainable fashion companies are combining co-creation of fashion businesses and co-creation of sustainability in their co-creation operations together with the customers. This research offers a basis for further research to build on sustainable fashion companies and their customer co-creation practices.Description
Thesis advisor
Blakaj, HedonTurunen, Linda
Keywords
customer co-creation, sustainable fashion, sustainable business models, sustainability co-creation, fashion sustainability