Value creation in the 4IR

Abstract

Value creation in the 4IR is customer-centric, interactive and hyper-personalised. Real-time consumer brand experiences, interactions and relations can be transformed into quantifiable data that can be monitored and tracked (‘datafication’). This study theorises that platform ecosystems, including millennials, converge on digital multisided platforms (MSPs), which are sociotechnical constructs that foment and generate significant value for platform owners and users. As value creation has risen as a digital economy business imperative, and a subject for academic research, the importance of millennials to brands warrants further investigation. This study aims to show how the interplay of social relations between millennials and brands, along with technology, are used to create value from the millennials’ perspective. To this end, it uses a consumer-dominant logic to explain and predict novel connections between key value creation constructs by millennial prosumers, including sole-creation, co-creation, collaboration, value destruction, value depreciation and value co-destruction. It presents three propositions that reimagine fit-for-purpose brands as interoperable constructs which exhibit complementarity, as well as the social dynamics of millennial interaction on digital MSPs. Findings indicate a cyclical value-interdependent relational system between millennials and brands, where millennial interaction leads to the creation or destruction of value. It also demonstrates how brands and platform owners can collaborate with millennials as an important and technologically savvy generation to co-create, capture and communicate value on digital MSPs.