Designing Interactive Value Development: Perspectives and Strategies for High Precision Marketing

This dissertation addresses the design of value productive episodes at the customer/firm boundary. Its purpose is: To provide perspective and help articulate strategies for increasing precision of the design of interactive marketing and value productive efforts at firm/customer boundaries.

Many observers, thinkers and practitioners of marketing and management are: (1) Struggling to comprehend and manage the impact of new IT/media on what they do; and (2) Striving to actively shape the development and use of these technologies and perceptions of them in marketing and other contexts. Comprehending the impact of technology and striving to shape its 'cause,' the dissertation argues, is largely an act of design. Not design of technology, but rather their use. In this case, their use in value productive episodes at firm / customer boundaries. This dissertation identifies and advances some basic value configuration logics and places the design of value productive episodes in the center of focus, rather than technology, individuals, segments, or structures.

Basic value configuration logics are identified and defined. These are value adding, value capturing, value extracting, and value creating. They are collapsed into two strategic dimensions: value generative and value distributive. Using these logics and strategic dimensions, a robust platform for understanding and designing value productive episodes is presented.

The design of value productive episodes as a substantive and productive domain of inquiry, and as a methodology of knowledge construction itself, is advanced. Formal and substantive design generation is compared with formal and substantive grounded theory generation. Formal design develops formal principles that can be applied in numerous substantive design exercises. Substantive design tasks are more concrete exercises addressing a specific and often localized context, like that of designing and marketing a particular offering made by a given firm using various customer interfaces. Substantive design domains explored in cases in this dissertation include information intensive services in the energy industry, and others using IT/media as the primary channel of service delivery, like the world-wide-web. Value configuration logics are expanded to explore 'business models' built upon portfolios of value offerings exploiting different value configuration logics.