Epilogue to the special issue and reflections on the future of engagement research

Co-creation is a transcending perspective of marketing, an umbrella term recognising the contemporary evaluation of value creation (Vargo and Lusch, 2016b; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). It requires bridging concepts such as engagement to bring relevance to inform marketing/market practices (Brodie, Saren and Pels, 2011). Through the development and exploration of mid-range theory that underpins co-creation, it enables a more prescriptive understanding reflective of business practice and conducive to empirical evaluation, which ultimately enables the meta-theoretic perspective to move forward (Vargo and Lusch, 2016b).