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.