Executive Interviews: Interview with Gaurav Bhalla on Co-Creation
March 2010 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Gaurav Bhalla
Gaurav Bhalla, has 30+ years of global experience helping companies implement innovation, strategy, marketing, and business growth programs.

• Firstly, congratulations on having co-authored a wonderful piece in January – March 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, titled ‘Rethinking Marketing’. In the article, youmade a strong case for cultivating relationships with customers. What are the new ways to cultivate relationships with customers? Are the customers not overwhelmed with relationship blitzkrieg?
  Thank you for your kind words. Your question brings a smile to my face. Isn’t it ironical, if the literature says – build relationships, and the customer says – sorry, not interested! Which is why I prefer to view relationships between a company and its customers as an outcome of a company’s long-term actions. Authenticity, transparency, and a mindset that refuses to exploit the customer for the sake of profit is the new currency of relationship building. Few companies realize that it is the customer that agrees to enter into a relationship with a company, not the other way around. No company can thump a customer on the head and demand a relationship. The customer agrees to enter into a relationship with a company, only after he/she is convinced that the company has authentic and transparent intentions, doesn’t tradeoff customer interests in favor of profits, and has real, meaningful, and relevant value to offer.

• What are the key ideas of the HBR article on Rethinking Marketing?
  What are the key ideas of the HBR article on Rethinking Marketing?

  • Companies should leverage the power of available technologies to interact with and understand their customers.
  • In order to compete effectively companies must shift from pushing individual products to developing long-term customer relationships
  • The marketing department should be reinvented as a customer department, replacing the Chief Marketing Officer with a Chief Customer Officer, and customer facing functions, like CRM, R&D, and Marketing Research should be overseen by the customer department
  • Customer profitability, measured by Customer Life-time Value and Customer Equity, should replace traditional measures of performance like product profitability

• What does co-creation mean to you? Are there any parallels between co-creation and joint-research or collaborative-research efforts at business schools and other institutions?
  Co-creation, as currently used in the business and marketing world, has a very specific meaning. Rather than present a definition, my preference would be to explain co-creation by decomposing it, so we can better understand its characteristics. First, co-creation, represents interaction, and takes place between one or more firms, and one or more actual or potential customers. Second, this interaction is willing, purposive, and intentional. Third, this interaction is managed, either by the firm, or jointly by the firm and its customers. Fourth, the output of this interaction results in value both for the firm as well as its customers. Lastly, the value created for customers may or may not be unique, and is derived through a variety of experiences, such as suggesting, refining, designing, improving, fixing, and consuming.
  The question about collaborative research is tricky. Large open collaboration research projects, like the Human Genome Project are examples of co-creation. But I don’t think this can be generalized to all research projects. Some efforts may result in a paper for a Journal that creates value only for the researchers who are published. It would be a huge stretch to label that as cocreation. Collaboration yes, cocreation perhaps not.

• What according to you is the difference between traditional system of value creation and co-creation as propounded by you? Can you give us a few examples of companies that have benefited from co-creating value?
  What according to you is the difference between traditional system of value creation and co-creation as propounded by you? Can you give us a few examples of companies that have benefited from co-creating value?
  As for examples, here are a few:

  • The entire open source movement has benefited from co-creation, earliest example, Linux; more recently Ubuntu, an open source alternative to Windows and Office, co-created by a worldwide team of developers
  • Blizzard Entertainment, the fabled makers of the computer game World of Warcraft, uses co-creation to fix glitches, create new characters, and new gaming experiences for their legions of fans
  • Companies like Hallmark, Nike, Adidas, P&G, Unilever, Marico, IFF, Audi, and Dell routinely use cocreation to design, develop, and deliver new value to their actual and potential customers; Dell’s Ideastorm is often cited to be the gold standard for co-creating customer service experience.