Managing customer participation through customer education

With the acknowledgement that customers are co-creators of value (Vargo and Lusch, 2004) has come greater prominence for customer education as a crucial aspect of communications that contributes to the management of customers’ participation. This paper proposes an overarching model of the relationship between customer education and customer participation, based on a review of the extant literature. The model consists of four basic parts, namely, forms of customer education, forms of customer participation, psychological mechanisms mediating customer education-participation relationships and contextual factors moderating customer education effects. A review of the extant literature reveals relationships that have been conceptualised and

empirically examined; it explores research methods, design, measurement and sampling issues and considers fragmentation in the literature that has left gaps in current knowledge and even obscured our understanding of the customer educationparticipation relationship. The paper concludes with an agenda for future research in this area.