Samenvatting

The advent of the internet as a publicly available service in the 1990s set new standards for communication. With e-mailing and chatting in the picture, the way people talk to each other was revolutionized; within years, it became normal to have a least one personal computer per household in the westernized world. With the dawn of the third millennium, however, the digital revolution had only just begun. Inventions such as the iPod, wireless internet and social media, branded westernized society and shaped consumer behavior. The younger generations, most notably Generation Y, those born between 1978 and 1992 (Bielski, 2007), live up to the new stereotype of the super-connected networked consumer.
But in accordance with the shift in consumer behavior, the fashion in which companies were catering to buyer demands had to change as well. The internet, panacea to traditional communication barriers between buyers and suppliers, emancipated the consumer form the receptive position top-down approaches put him in. Thus, the approach of relationship marketing was widely adapted to build sustainable connections and maximize customer lifetime value for companies. However, companies do not only face the challenge of marketing to a very informed and demanding consumer, but also have to achieve a competitive advantage in a globalized economy with essentially infinite shelf space. Therefore, relationship marketing has to be taken to the next level.
Co-creation theory which is based on a thorough and continuous dialogue between companies and consumers appears to be the next logical step. It largely utilizes online communication tools and advocates the importance of companies listening to their customer's opinions and ideas. The dialogue is not tied to a certain field, but ranges from product development to marketing and distribution, giving companies unprecedented pos
Nevertheless, because co-creation is a new approach, there are very few statistics, mostly case studies, half of which there are no results yet. Furthermore, there is a lack of an extensive theoretical framework.
In conclusion, co-creation theory is obviously an interesting field for marketers right now, if they want to achieve a competitive advantage on grounds of company-consumer relations. Yet, each
company, or rather each brand, which engages in co-creation with their consumers has to evaluate the process in great detail, adjusting the few models the theory is based on towards the individual situations.