Beyond negative liberties: the role of the brand as value facilitator

So far value co-creation literature has been devoting much of its attention to explore and frame the primary role of customers as ultimate value co-creators, neglecting to adequately acknowledge the new role of the firm as value enabler. The latest supremacy of customers as empirical focus leaves then open the following question: what is the role of the firm in value co-creation (Grönroos, 2008)? In the current society the role of the firm seems to be regulated mainly by “negative liberties” (Berlin, 1969) that represent non-action imperatives or imposed impediments to do something: “do not control, do not take over, do not over-speak, do not show off, do not intrude, do not annoy”, just to mention some. We argue that in order to better understand the role of the brand in value co-creation, positive actions need to be uncovered beyond negative liberties to recognize the potential of the firm as value facilitator (Veloutsou, 2009). More concretely we contend that the actions performed by the brand in order to enable value co-creation by customers need to be empirically explored and identified in order to advance our understanding of value co-creation process in an actionable way (Grönroos, 2011). This paper interpretively investigates how brand decision-makers conceive and represent through the narratives of their branding practices the role of the brand in facilitating the encounter and the interaction with customers to encourage the process of value co-creation.