Co-creating Your Own Luck - A Quantitative Study of Non-participating Consumers' Responses to Communicated Consumer Co-creation in New Product Development

Sammanfattning: Consumers are deemed to be the most important external source used in innovation processes. Recently, the interest in consumer involvement in new product development has increased, both in practice and within research. Co-creation research has advanced, mainly within the interconnection of Innovation Management literature, focusing on implementation of co-creation processes, and Marketing Management literature, focusing on the communication of co-creation efforts. However, a threefold knowledge gap is identified: (1) research has not yet concluded which open innovation strategies are preferred, (2) limited research has investigated non-participating consumers' perceptions of consumer involvement, and (3) there has been a lack of understanding how signaling factors affect the response to co-creation communication. The purpose is consequently to advance the knowledge of the non-participating consumers' responses to communicated co-creation initiatives within new product development. This was achieved by applying a deductive research approach, testing theory-based hypotheses through a self-completion, online survey-based experiment. Three different co-creation scenarios; Open Competition, Open Online Community and Selective Online Community as well as a Closed Innovation scenario were manipulated to measure the effect of communicated co-creation on Customer-Based Brand Equity. Additionally, signals from the co-creating consumer, the co-creation process and the co-created product were measured to add explanatory value to this relationship. This thesis concludes that consumer co-creation cannot just be deemed as good. On the contrary, the choice of consumer co-creation strategy appears more intricate. The study finds few significant differences in Customer-Based Brand Equity between the various co-creation scenarios and the Closed Innovation scenario. However, the study confirms that perceptions of similarity to, and expertise of co-creation participants, the empowerment their involvement signals, and the complexity of the product itself, all affect the relationship between communication of different types of co-creation efforts and Customer-Based Brand Equity.