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The Complexity of Owning the Customer Within Ecosystems : A study of owning the customer within ecosystems

Ekornrud, Celine; Fjellbirkeland, Maria Welle
Master thesis
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URI
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3050556
Date
2022
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  • Master Thesis [4656]
Abstract
This thesis explores the phenomenon of owning the customer within business ecosystems.

Business ecosystems are complex entities where dissimilar organisations jointly deliver value

to the customer by balancing cooperation and competition. While businesses need to

collaborate to deliver value, they instinctively compete, creating friction between actors within

an ecosystem. This situation may then raise the question of who has access to, and can gain,

customer ownership. To date, limited research on owning the customer in an ecosystem setting

has been conducted. The main aim of this thesis is therefore to understand what it means to

own the customer in an ecosystem and discover how an ecosystem actor can obtain ownership.

This paper is conducted as an exploratory multi-case study, analysing secondary data from 15

semi-structured interviews mainly from the retail industry. The empirical findings are assessed

with existing literature on owning the customer and business ecosystems in general, to better

understand customer ownership in an ecosystem setting.

The findings of this study suggest that owning the customer can be defined as having direct

and/or indirect ties with the customer in ways that optimise firms’ individual value capture

within an ecosystem and maximise joint value creation potential for the customer. Ties in this

setting relate to a firm communicating with customers and/or obtaining the needed customer

data from the ecosystem’s customer journey. Moreover, the findings of this study also suggest

that the roles actors adopt within ecosystems are decisive in the allocation of who gets to own

the customer. The orchestrators of ecosystems seem more likely to obtain ownership as they

have more power in the ecosystem structure. Nevertheless, the findings highlight that

orchestrators’ desire for sole ownership increases friction between them and their

complementors. This friction seems to complicate the ecosystem’s function of jointly creating

more value as it hinders cooperation. Therefore, the findings argue that creating a sound

relation between actors would be necessary to share ownership of the customer and thus ensure

stronger value creation.

Finally, as this thesis mainly aims to define owning the customer and to understand who owns

the customer in an ecosystem, future research should be conducted on how power imbalance

between actors might negatively influence the overall value proposition of an ecosystem.

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