Description:
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title>
<jats:p>Extant branding literature is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation in which the roles of brand actors remain unspecified. To help provide clarity, the purpose of this paper is to critically appraise how brand professionals understand brand value co-creation and perceive their role in facilitating it, with the aim of questioning its viability in day-to-day brand management practices.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title>
<jats:p>Building on brand professionals’ reflexivity, the study develops a qualitative methodological glance via semi-structured interviews based on confrontational techniques with a purposive sample of 28 experienced brand decision-makers.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title>
<jats:p>Brand professionals perceive accessibility, reciprocity and citizenship as the gateways provided by the firm for value co-creation to happen. Despite their enthusiastic rhetorical afflatus in making explicit their viewpoints about how firms can facilitate value co-creation, the current translation into practice of the role of the firm does not seem to be able to overcome the sender-biased approach that still resides in brand management.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Practical implications</jats:title>
<jats:p>To go beyond the limits of rhetorical representations and make brand value facilitation more actionable, the authors provide guidelines on how firms can create and enhance the circumstances for the co-creation of brand value to occur in interactions with consumers and stakeholders.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title>
<jats:p>This study contributes to the critical actionability of the brand value co-creation by elucidating how firms currently perceive their facilitation role. The paper provides strategic recommendations to put co-creation rhetoric into practice by reframing and expanding the scope and the significance of brand management.</jats:p>
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