Establishing the boundaries of brand co-creation

Despite the extensive use of the concept of co-creation, there is no consensus on the frontiers between co-creation and other forms of stakeholder collaboration and engagement in branding. This chapter addresses this limitation by proposing fundamental conditions to assume brand co-creation. First, we extract preliminary assumptions to posit co-creation in branding from the foundational service-dominant logic, value co-creation logic and service logic. Second, we provide a structured reframing of those assumptions based on the analysis of the key aspects of co-creation in several streams of knowledge. The study culminates in a framework that establishes the boundaries of co-creation in the branding field. The chapter's main contribution is to bring clarity into the theorical and practical scope of co-creation in branding and to address the question: To what extent can a brand be considered co-created?