The Strategic Value of Corporate Blogging

Abstract

Corporate blogs allow companies to connect and communicate with their customers online. Research in the area of corporate blogging has largely focused on established US-based B2C companies (e.g. Fortune 500) operating in technology markets; little is known about corporate blogging practices among smaller B2B companies in service-based markets. Furthermore, the importance of company-customer communications has been highlighted in the Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic) literature as a crucial precedent for both parties to co-create value. However, despite corporate blogs being touted as a suitable platform for companies to facilitate company-customer interactions online, no research has so far combined the study of corporate blogs and its potential for value co-creation from an S-D Logic perspective.

Particularly lacking is knowledge about the company’s role in affecting the customer’s value creation processes through interactive company-customer exchanges occurring on the corporate blog. To address this gap in the literature, this thesis explores the usage of corporate blogs as a marketing tool and its potential in creating value online, based on findings drawn from qualitative interviews with 16 New Zealand companies from four service industries. A mix of inductive and deductive content analysis was performed on the interview data, resulting in meaningful themes portraying the participants’ collective blogging experience. Each company’s corporate blog data was also analysed to corroborate and extend the research findings.

Findings showed a majority of companies utilising corporate blogs as a communication platform to share information and expertise with their target audience online. The corporate blog’s potential for value co-creation was also demonstrated through seven kinds of value propositions offered to customers, based on four types of interactive company-customer exchanges occurring on the blog. Favourable business-related outcomes were also obtained from the companies’ blogging endeavours. A model (called ‘the co-creation of value taxonomy’) was subsequently developed from the research findings; illustrating four levels of interactive company-customer exchanges, the corresponding value propositions offered to customers and value received by the company. To convey trust to their customers on the blog, companies adopted a mixture of approaches in appearing transparent and credible online. Furthermore, in maintaining the informality and authenticity of blogging as an activity, most corporate bloggers resorted to using ‘common sense’ or peer reviews to ensure that they blogged appropriately. Finally, depending on the company’s blogging objective and marketing strategy – both hard and soft returns were used as indicators in assessing the corporate blog’s ROI value.

This thesis found corporate blogs to be valuable as a marketing and communication tool, and that its potential for value co-creation with customers is possible. It is hoped that the findings obtained would help to highlight the role of corporate blogs in improving company-customer engagement online, while significantly contributing to the online marketing and evolving S-D Logic literature. In particular, it is believed that the co-creation of value taxonomy model would help marketing practitioners and academics to research more effective corporate blogging strategies. Such knowledge could help companies and their customers to harness more meaningful and valuable co-created outcomes online.