Customer Empowerment Strategies seen by the non-participants: an exploratory research

Abstract

New technology development, like Web 2.0, allow easy and fast exchanges between consumers and firms. Besides, more and more firms empower their consumers, giving them more active roles in their innovation process. Over the past decade, the customer empowerment strategies have especially been studied from the angle of participating consumers. The first research focusing on the consumers not participating was only published in 2011 and showed positive effects on non-participating consumers’ perceptions and behavioural intentions. In the first section of this exploratory paper, we come back on the concept of customer empowerment strategy, clarify the differences with other forms of participative marketing and provide a synthesis of the existing literature focusing on the non-participants. In a second section, we identify common barriers for participation, we shed initial light on the non-participants’ growing expectations toward the brand when engaging into customer empowerment strategies and we highlighted that consumers make distinction among customer empowerment strategies, i.e. “one-shot” actions versus permanent online platform, which in turn leads to different appreciations toward the brands