Co-creating educational consumer journeys: A sensemaking perspective

Abstract To date, customer education has been framed in terms of one-way information provision, at odds with much the literature on meaning co-creation. Drawing an ethnography a specialty coffee purveyor, we show how staff and consumers co-create educational consumer journeys through deployment seven practices: auditing, realignment, marrying competing logics, negotiating scripts, evangelizing, expanding collective knowledge, impression management. These practices require to enact three different roles (educator, student, peer), which are necessary for co-creation extension journeys. The roles, themselves emerge iteratively sensebreaking, sensegiving, sensemaking processes among staff, servicescape. Our findings frame as dynamic process is co-created between participants. Furthermore, cues touchpoints needed meaning-making shift power relations participants change. Managerially, these highlight potential expand established market categories.