Marketing evolution: the role of crowdsourcing in strategic and marketing choices

This paper aims at examining the evolution of marketing strategies in a perspective of stronger customers involvements. Customers are not merely targets of strategic activities but play an active role in design and implementation of marketing policies both at induced and organic level. This statement comes from the higher consumer confidence in the use of web 2.0 tools and their value-added services. Particularly, the current research would analyze a specific aspect of firm-consumer-firm connection: crowd-sourcing. This paper employs a case study analysis in order to deeply understand which are the implications of the customer role in the crowd-sourcing initiatives. In particular, considering the specific tourism context, the research aims at exploring to what extent the crowd-sourcing initiatives influence the marketing activities both at induced and organic level. The research uses two approaches: the Service Dominant Logic (SDL) and the Resource-Based Theory (RBT). In order to empirically investigate the crowdsourcing activities, this paper explores the reason why Turismo Emilia Romagna chooses to apply to the crowd; how it involves the community and what are the firm’s resources and competences in developing crowd-sourcing activities.