Collective consumption and co-creation in a crowdfunding community.

Abstract

Collective consumption studies how the co-presence of multiple consumers affects the experience of each other (Bruce et al., 2019). This paper studies the role of peers in online communities, with the goal of understanding how resources are integrated to co-create value in a service ecosystem. We chose rewards-based crowdfunding as the context of the research due to its interactive, participative, and informal nature. Research Design and Methods We conducted a qualitative study to gauge the informal exchanges among the members of communities. The first step was a netnographic analysis of an important online forum built around the crowdfunding of collectibles, gathering messages referring to potential integration of resources. We then analyzed these messages as recommended by the Gioia Methodology (Corley and Gioia, 2011), by aggregating the data according to theory- and researcher-centered concepts and later developing a grounded theoretical model. Findings and Results We found that crowdfunding communities can be interpreted as collective actors since they share a collective identity. This result was achieved by applying the definition of actor in Service Dominant Logic, as a resource-integrator and value co-creator (Koskela-Huotari and Siltaloppi, 2020). We analyzed the resources that were shared by the community, as well as the value co-creation that would not happen without them. Besides the eight kinds of co-creation that were known to happen in crowdfunding (Quero and Ventura, 2019), we identified a ninth type that is unique to communities, co-inspiration: “the value co-created by a community that allows the formation of a shared set of opinions. These practices can instruct the ideal behavior for new and old actors of the ecosystem and inspire them to try different roles”.