Enabling Cocreation With Transformative Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Conceptualization of Consumer Boosting

Abstract

Service research emphasizes the relevance of consumers’ participation in the cocreation of transformative outcomes like health and well-being. However, in complex services, consumers’ limited operant resources and lacking resource integration efficiency hinder transformative value cocreation. Service research on mechanisms that facilitate well-being through efficient resource integration is sparse, but several disciplines elaborate cognitive interventions with that target. These interventions have been validated in various contexts. Nevertheless, concerns persist that they can hurt, rather than help, individual consumers. Overcoming such limitations requires an interdisciplinary effort. The present article outlines the new research area “transformative consumer interventions” (TCI) by integrating interventions theory, consumer psychology, and transformative service research in a health context. TCI provide theory-driven principles for the selection and design of interventions that facilitate operant resource integration in complex services. Additionally, we conceptualize consumer boosting, the first TCI-based intervention construct. Consumer boosts are efficient, context-specific, and personalized interventions that enhance individuals’ operant resources. Consumer boosting provides a pathway to transformative cocreation and alleviates the risk of unintended consequences and value co-destruction. This research illustrates that the transformative service domain stands to benefit substantially from getting involved in the discussion on consumer interventions and offers a unique perspective for further conceptual elaboration.

Customer service co-creation literacy for better service value: evidence from the health-care sector

“…Understanding customers’ expertise to be more proactive in service co-creation is of great theoretical and managerial importance (Bieler et al , 2022; Ostrom et al , 2021). To co-create actively, customers need to be able to interact, pool resources together and integrate such resources into effective applications (Caridà et al , 2019).…”

“…health care) and uncovering its drivers and consequences. By addressing customer SCL, the study adds to the understanding of how cognitive interventions are linked to transformative value (Bieler et al , 2022), given that a low level of customers’ knowledge is commonly associated with their vulnerability (Mende et al , 2017), leading to decreased well-being (Rosenbaum et al , 2017).…”

“…Thirdly, health care is a rich context to investigate vulnerable customers’ resource integration under the trend of customer responsibilization (Anderson et al , 2016). In such a context, the role of SCL may be further intensified because of customers’ negative physical, emotional and psychological conditions (Bieler et al , 2022). Finally, health service delivery involves expertise asymmetry, power imbalance and reluctant customers, which may limit the inputs from customers to the service and impair their decision-making capacity (Berry, 2019).…”

“…However, scholars and practitioners then realize that conceptualizing health literacy this way does not fully capture the broad range of cognitive and social skills that are expected of health-care customers (Chinn, 2011). In this respect, interactive and critical health literacy may be better aligned with the contemporary perspective of health-care service (Bieler et al , 2022).…”

Rethinking customer engagement design: Using customer-mobilized engagement (CME) to grow business networks

“…1 is a simplified illustration of an exemplary CME pathway organized according to context, mechanisms, and outcomes. We adopt the term exemplary pathway (Bieler, Maas, Fischer, & Rietmann, 2021) in Fig. 1 to allow a super-simplified processual illustration of an intensely complex, dynamic, interdependent, interconnected and iterative process of CME.…”