Value co-creation through content marketing : a business to business perspective

Sammanfattning: The age of traditional marketing is beginning to end and the digital revolution will continueits journey. Today, most companies meet their business customers for the first time in a digitalenvironment and decision-makers stay longer more frequently in the digital world beforeinitiating contact with a company. Many argue that companies need to connect, collaborateand co-create with others to be able to succeed. Content marketing and value co-creation arejust some of the methodologies companies could adopt in order to succeed. Previous researchhas investigated value co-creation and partly content marketing, but these combined areashave not been previously researched together. Especially not from a business to businessperspective which this thesis has conducted. This study was initiated based on previousresearch, where a gap was found regarding these subjects. Therefore, the aim of this researchwas to study how value co-creation can be achieved through content marketing, from anenterprise perspective.This research was constructed by performing a multiple-case study on two Swedishcompanies, with two employees on each company. The data collection resulted in valuableinsights regarding the process of value co-creation and content marketing. The theoretical andempirical findings include similar views of the research areas, which are further presented inthe discussion chapter where the DARTT model has been used as a tool. Additionally, thisstudy proves it is possible to co-create value with a business's customers through contentmarketing and it also presents a general suggestion of how it can be achieved. Lastly, we hopeour thesis has the potential of acting as a base for further research, such as exploring the mosteffective digital platforms within content marketing from a business to business perspective,since it was not the purpose of this study to present that kind of insight.