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Our study is focused on the case of a company-managed online brand community in the soda drink sector, which failed in facilitating value co-creation. The aim was to explore the meaning-making processes taking place inside the company, among brand decision-makers, to highlight the factors hindering value co-creation between company and consumers in the brand community context. The study followed a qualitative multi-method design based on three interlaced motivational, semiotic and narrative research phases. The results reveal how some key misalignments rooted in inner tensions in the meaning-making processes among brand decision-makers resonate in an ambiguous community identity, which is then reflected into a detached and opportunistic consumer experience of the community, to the detriment of its value co-creation potential. The study points at the theoretical relevance of analysing the meaning-making processes occurring among brand decision-makers, since their internal fine-tuning represents a precondition for value co-creation processes with consumers in the community context.

Consumers participate in social media producing value through social labor. So far scholars approached social labor through a Marxist lens focusing on the economic aspects of its value and the potential risks related to consumers' exploitation. We build a sociocultural conceptualization of social labor actualizing the Aristotelian idea of virtuous action that realizes a life well lived with others. Following this approach, we identify Eudaimonia as a theoretical construct to capture the sociocultural value of social labor, and we elaborate how social labor in social media enables the achievement of a eudaimonic state of living. We support our conceptualization with empirical evidence in the social media context of amateur cooking practices that illustrates how Eudaimonia is achieved through social labor practices of cultural performativity. Our perspective extends previous theory related to three research domains of consumers' social labor: (1) Marxist and technocapitalist critique, (2) neoliberalist perspective, and (3) networked consumer collectives.