Online Social Networks: Motivations and Value Co-Creation
Online social networking has become an omnipresent part of modern society. Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Amazon, just to name a few, have practically become household names as consumers and businesses alike are joining in
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at focus on self-growth, 3) whether the behavior is an active versus passive response to circumstances, and 4) whether internal versus external goal orientations are associated with the motive. These sixteen motivations, which help to explain the reasons behind the gamut of consumer behavior, are: consistency, attribution, categorization, objectification, autonomy, stimulation, teological, utilitarian, tension-reduction, expressive, ego-defensive, reinforcement assertion, affiliation, identification, and modeling. McGuire (1974) describes each of these motivations, cited various supporting theories for individual motivations, and described how each of them can provide mass communication gratification. Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) Service-Dominant Logic paradigm provides explanation for co-creation of value for consumers and companies through online social networks. Their pivotal article outlines a major paradigm shift in marketing from a goods-centered to a service-centered dominant logic. The focus went from operand resources (goods) to operant (service) resources, which act on operand and other operant resources to produce effects. Online social networks are an operant resource because they are intangible, dynamic processes that provide information and enable consumers to co-create, and multiply the value of, operant resources. Vargo and Lusch (2004) identify the use of operant resources as the key to obtaining competitive advantage. Consumers are also operant resources themselves in that they act on the online social network to cocreate value through behaviors such as posting information, providing word-of-mouth communications with other users, and making purchases. This study investigates value that is co-created for consumers and for firms through consumers’ behavioral co-creation activities. METHOD Qualitative data collection in the form of depth-interviews is currently in progress to gain deep insight into the motivations for with engaging in online social networking, behaviors specific to online social networks, and the ultimate value reaped by consumers and organizations. Preliminary results are presented below, but more complete findings will be available at the date of the upcoming conference, if this abstract is accepted. A laddering technique, also known as a means-end chain analysis (Gutman 1982), is being employed in the in-depth interviews. This method is appropriate for this study because it guides respondents through concrete and abstract attributes, benefits and values to provide a deep understanding of the underlying factors of concrete online social network behaviors, as well as the abstractions of value that are co-created in the process (Frauman and Cunningham 2001). This approach is said to provide unique insights into the factors that motivate and guide choice and patronage behavior and the ultimate abstract goals or consequences of such behavior (Klenosky, Gengler, and Mulvey 1993). This technique has been successfully used in several studies that use one-on-one interviews (Bagozzi and Dabholkar
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