The Rhetoric of Co-Creation.

Abstract

Co-creation, the idea that brands should work with consumers and other stakeholders as equal partners in order to collaboratively generate ideas about what they produce and how they should market it, appears to be currently enjoying an enthusiastic reception amongst marketing academics and practitioners. This chapter looks critically at the evolution of the idea of co-creation in marketing thought and practice by closely reading the texts that have provided the foundational thinking behind the perspective as well as investigating the way in which practitioners talk about its adoption and implementation. This exploration highlights serious tensions between traditional marketing’s desire for control over consumers and co- creation’s apparent surrender of control to them. Yet, these tensions are shown to be largely rhetorical in nature, serving to strategically position a ‘new’ egalitarian marketing that relies just as much upon the traditional marketing control-orientation as the old approach it has ‘Othered’. Co-creation, therefore, can be viewed as a form of disinformation that aids marketing in misdirecting attention away from its moribund state and resulting crisis of relevancy.