Value Co-Creation and Sustainability: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Sustainability and co-creation of value are two current topics for the marketing field. The purpose of this paper is to develop a systematic literature review taken these two topics together to highlight their implications to Sustainable Marketing. A systematic literature review about Sustainability and Value co-creation is performed based on papers published between 2010 and 2020, indexed on Web of Science. Bibliometric results indicate a significant increase in the number of articles, journals and authors for the two fields considered together over the last 10 years (2010-2020). Our research highlights the recent greater visibility of Sustainability and of Value co-creation, and of the relationship between the two fields, particularly in the last 5 years.

We found that those studies are mostly related with Sustainable Development, Innovation in Design and Services, Corporate Social Responsibility, Business Networks, Customer Engagement, Business Models, Dominant Logic in Services and others residual fields (as, for instance Medicine and Health), and the need to complement the literature relating it with Services and with B2B relationships.

We conclude that both sustainability and value co-creation are topics that discuss how firms and customers can interact over time for sustainable development. In addition, this paper shows that the research conciliating the two theoretical areas is scarce, which is an opportunity to develop the literature. Thus, our research highlights that theoretical and empirical research relating sustainability and value co-creation is need in order to develop the literature on Sustainable Marketing.