Abstract
Consumers increasingly collaborate with the company and other consumers across various phases of firm’s new product development (pre-launch activities through ideation, design, and testing) and after-launch marketing process (post-launch activities through promotion, pricing distribution, and maintenance). The purpose of this study is to examine factors influencing consumer participation in firm’s pre- and post-launch co-creation. We propose that company-led efforts through enhanced knowledge sharing with consumers and perceived equity lead to effective dialogical interactions between company and consumers and among consumers, leading to a higher level of consumer participation in both pre- and post-launch co-creation. The proposed model is empirically tested by structural equation modeling using survey data from online video game players, a context rich in consumer co-creation. We find that consumer-to-consumer interaction enhances consumer participation in both pre-launch and post-launch, while business-to-consumer interaction enhances consumer participation only in pre-launch but not in post-launch.
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Notes
The following steps were undertaken as robustness checks: (1) correlated the error terms of CP in pre-launch co-creation and CP in post-launch co-creation, (2) used alternative operationalization of CP in co-creation by dropping the 2nd (participation frequency with other consumers), and 3rd (extent of engagement with other consumers) survey items. The results remained qualitatively consistent with our original findings, providing evidence for the robustness of our results.
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This paper received IRB exemption approval from the Rutgers University- The State University of New Jersey. All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Lee, K., Uslay, C. & Yeniyurt, S. An empirical examination of consumer co-creation process. Mark Lett 34, 205–222 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-022-09638-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-022-09638-3