Luxury brand value co-creation with online brand communities in the service encounter

A constant challenge for luxury brands is identifying ways to add value to their offering, compensating for the high price charged. Previous research has highlighted that superior value is added when customers and brands collaborate by co-creating and introducing unique experiences to the offering. However, there is limited research on how brands and their customers co-create value in an online context. Online brand community engagement is central to this process. Drawing upon the service dominant logic and the luxury customer value framework, we conduct fifteen in-depth interviews with managers and fifty with customers of a luxury hotel brand, followed by a netnography of its online community. This results in the development of a typology that supports online value cocreation. The results show that the pleasurable/experiential content provides the highest engagement. The study reinforces the benefit of using the experiential approach to build a successful content strategy within online luxury communities.