Encounters in an Online Brand Community: Development and Validation of a Metric for Value Co-Creation by Customers

Recent developments in service marketing have demonstrated the potential value co-creation by customers who participate in online brand communities (OBCs). Therefore, this study forecasts the co-created value by understanding the participation/behavior of customers in a multi-stakeholder OBC. This six-phase qualitative and quantitative investigation conceptualizes, constructs, refines, and tests a 12-item three-dimensional scale for measuring key factors that are related to the experience, interpersonal interactions, and social relationships that affect the value co-creation by customers in an OBC. The scale captures stable psychometric properties, measured using various reliability and validity tests, and can be applied across various industries. Finally, the utility implications and limitations of the proposed scale are discussed, and potential future research directions considered.