Together We Are Stronger-Paving the Way for Value Co-Creation in Data Breach Responses

Data breaches pose severe risks to companies. In fact, those incidents
generate adverse effects on the customer relationship and companies’ financial
performance. To this end, prior research has demonstrated that a dedicated
response strategy to a data breach can mitigate these consequences. Nevertheless,
contemporary research focuses on one-way response communication with the
affected customer. Customers receive notification of the incident and are offered
a pre-determined solution but are not actively integrated into the data breach
response process. In turn, informed through service failure literature, we argue
that a value co-creation perspective of data breach response strategies holds
merit. We identify six distinct research avenues for future data breach research
through a hermeneutic literature review of salient co-recovery literature. Our
research represents a novelty to the field of data breach response strategies. We
synthesize the service failure, data breach, and co-creation streams of literature
and highlight research shortcomings and opportunities.