Insights into How Vietnamese Retailers Utilize Social Media to Facilitate Knowledge Creation through the Process of Value Co-Creation

Abstract

Social media usage is a direct result of Internet connectivity and is gaining increased prominence in business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and consumer-to-business (C2B) relationship building, which is allowing marketers to devise and implement digital marketing strategies that are perceived as enhancing a customer’s well-being. Through the process of utilizing social media (SM) to share information with consumers, marketers are affording themselves with the concept of value co-creation and ensuring that the development of knowledge is given priority. To explain how this happens in an emerging economy, in-depth personal interviews were undertaken with the owners of five retail fashion companies in Vietnam. The findings indicate that fashion retail companies in Vietnam are deploying digital marketing strategies that deliver perceived enhanced value to consumers through the process of value co-creation. This highlights the advantage of using SM in relation to increasing retail staff’s ability to convert information into usable resources such as intelligence and knowledge. By achieving knowledge conversion, retail staff fulfill the role of ‘knowledge broker’ and ‘knowledge connector’, and identify how organizational intervention, such as new operating structures, can help to deliver perceived enhanced value to customers.

Exploring the Advantages of Using Social Media in the Romanian Retail Sector

“…Social media, through its characteristics, allows business organizations operating in retail to capitalize on the opportunities associated with these channels and applications, related to obtaining valuable feedback from customers [39], profoundly changing the brandconsumer interaction and value co-creation [40,41], and augmenting the communication and information sharing process [42][43][44].…”

“…Co-creation is the result of this interaction between the retailer and the consumer, facilitated by social media [52]. Co-creation has been defined as a [41] collaborative activity in which customers actively contribute to the creation of brand identity and image, as well as idea generation, information dissemination, and product and service creation or transformation. This special interaction also facilitates the creation of user-generated content (UGC), such as product reviews, ratings, product descriptions, consumer-generated advertising via personal blogs, etc.…”