Customer Value of Adolescents in LINE Services: Application of Grounded Hermeneutics

This article starts off by discussing the emic perspective of adolescents (microcosmic level) on LINE services in order to produce an etic account (macroscopic level) that will show the link between the adolescents’ values and its social context. In defining the adolescents’ customer value for LINE services, the teenagers of Taiwan and staff of Chung Hwa Telecoms were used as objects of the study. The data were processed in the 3-stage coding of grounded hermeneutics and used in the intertextual analysis. The main contribution of this research is the formulation of an overall customer value framework for adolescents in line with LINE services, and the discovery of the 3 core concepts of customer value path, namely: mass customization of digital content, conformity behavior, and relationship quality. The 3 core concepts converge to form the overall customer value that provides valuable insights on both the main proposition and value paths.

Keywords: LINE services, customer value, grounded hermeneutics.