To date, customer education has been framed in terms of one-way information provision, at odds with much of the literature on meaning co-creation. Drawing on an ethnography of a specialty coffee purveyor, we show how staff and consumers co-create educational consumer journeys through the deployment of seven practices: auditing, realignment, marrying competing logics, negotiating scripts, evangelizing, expanding collective knowledge, and impression management. These practices require staff and consumers to enact three different educational roles (educator, student, and peer), which are necessary for the co-creation and extension of consumer journeys. The roles, practices and the journeys themselves emerge iteratively through sensebreaking, sensegiving, and sensemaking processes among staff, consumers and the servicescape. Our findings frame customer education as a dynamic process in which meaning is co-created between participants. Furthermore, the cues and touchpoints needed for meaning-making shift as power relations between participants change. Managerially, these findings highlight the potential of co-created educational consumer journeys to expand established market categories.@en

Subverting scripts can be critical to successful service innovation. However, deviating from firmly embedded scripts can be risky, because doing so can confuse and frustrate customers. Through an ethnographic study of a specialist coffee shop, we investigate customers’ responses to the introduction of a script that countervailed dominant category norms. Drawing upon the constitutive elements of design thinking, we find that three practices— destabilization, control, and adaptation—led to the successful subversion and replacement of the dominant scripts. While this initially disoriented customers, the three identified practices enabled adoption by supporting customers’ transition to the new script. This study is novel in examining the practices and processes necessary for effective script subversion, and reveals the importance of thorough understanding of both the dominant script and customers’ experience of it. Moreover, it provides evidence of design thinking’s role in prompting and enacting service innovation.@en