Customer Resource Integration in Blog-Based Product Reviews

Abstract

The service-dominant logic (SDL) has been of interest to marketers in the last decade. SDL, a replacement to the traditional goods-dominant view of marketing, uses an integrative approach to propose a perspective on service marketing where service is treated as the fundamental basis of exchange. Central to this service perspective is the idea of resource integration. A relatively new and emerging component of resource integration is customer resource integration (CRI). This research examines CRI within the context of product reviews within beauty blogs. Beauty blogs have received little attention from academics even though they have a significant impact in enabling resource integration among bloggers themselves, audiences and organisations. The bloggers, as customers, play an important role in integrating resources. This study adopts a netnographic approach to explore how CRI manifests in blog-based product reviews. The data was retrieved using a non-participant observation method and data of blog content from beauty blogs. NVivo and Leximancer were used to assist the data analysis process. The results reveal that customers draw on six major resource categories in CRI processes. This thesis proposes a new model for understanding the customer’s operant and operand resources in an online context. In addition, the results suggest that the interactive relationship between bloggers and readers enables them to integrate resources. Based on the results, this thesis also proposes a new model for the integration of resources between customers. The contributions of this study are twofold. First, this research seeks to contribute to service literature by exploring manifestation of CRI in blog-based product reviews. Second, this research seeks to provide insights that can contribute to managerial practice.