Co-creators endorsing their winning product idea in ads: dealing with brand audiences’ skepticism

Abstract

Dell, McDonald’s, PespiCo and Starbucks are examples of firms relying on customer empowerment strategies for their new product development. Advertising those new products as user-driven has proven to have impacts on brand preferences and brand evaluations even on people not participating in the tools or platforms, namely the brand audience. With the present research, we respond Nishikawa et al. (2017)’s recent call: our moderated mediation model explains why and when a product marketed as “customer-ideated” better performs in terms of purchase intentions. Drawing on the co-creation literature and on the signalling theory, we design two studies with between-subject experimental designs. First, we show first that the publicity about the feedback given by the brand on participants’ submitted ideas as well as the process transparency enhance the non-participating brand audience’s perceptions of brand integrity. Second, we find that this effect is of substantive importance because it mediates positive outcomes with respect to non-participants’ both word-of-mouth and purchase intentions. Third, we identify the product complexity as a moderator that creates boundary condition for the impact on perceived brand integrity