Our chapter with my co-author, Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy, “Brands as co-creational lived experience ecosystems: an integrative theoretical framework of interactional creation” appears in Research Handbook on Brand Co-Creation: Theory, Practice and Ethical Implications.
As engaging actors interact more intensively with offerings through digitized services and digital engagement platforms in an Internetworked experience economy, the co-creation of brand value is accelerating toward interactive lived experiences. Seeing brands as “agencial assemblages” in ongoing and complex processes of constant flux in interactive system-environments, whose experiencial agencial relations are both constituted in and constitutive of enacted practices of interactive lived experiences, the concept of “co-creational lived experience ecosystem” introduced in this paper transcends goods and services in this vein of practices, while simultaneously calling attention to the need to pay attention to (increasingly digitalized) flows of interactive “agencing-structuring” experiences. We explicitly theorize brands as co-creational lived experience ecosystems as units of inquiry, with their intrinsic assemblage characteristics, and which always-already includes experiencers. We discuss how, in co-creational lived experience ecosystems, brand creation always entails enactment of both the co-creation of environments of emergent brand experiences and the embodied lived brand experiences of interactional creation through those environments. We then discuss the contributions that follow from our theorization of a Co-Creation Paradigm (CCP), especially in light of Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) of brand value co-creation.