Co-creating value and building resilience: a digital era framework for competitive advantage in electronics retailing

This study investigates the synergistic relationships among supply chain resilience, value co-creation, and social media promotion in driving competitive advantage within electronics retail. Employing structural equation modeling on data from 240 retail stores across four product categories in Jiangsu Province, China, the research reveals that sustainable competitive advantage emerges from the dynamic integration of operational, relational, and digital capabilities rather than isolated competencies. The findings demonstrate that supply chain resilience serves as the primary driver of competitive advantage (β = 0.51), while exhibiting strong co-evolution with value co-creation (r = 0.78). Social media promotion functions as a strategic multiplier, amplifying value co-creation’s competitive impact fourfold at high engagement levels. Critically, multi-group analysis reveals product-contingent strategic pathways, with lifestyle products like coffee machines exhibiting a “digital-first” pattern where social media and customer engagement dominate (β = 0.45 each), fundamentally inverting traditional operations-focused retail logic. A novel Digital Synergy Framework incorporating non-linear interactions and product-specific parameters achieves superior predictive performance (R² = 0.938, 45.9% error reduction) compared to conventional models. These findings provide actionable insights for retailers navigating digital transformation while advancing theoretical understanding of capability synergies in contemporary retail ecosystems.