PRE-ANNOUNCING CO-CREATION

Sammanfattning: Historically, new product development (NPD) has exclusively been assigned to internal company professionals. This model has increasingly been questioned and many have advocated the concept of consumer co-creation, a collaborative NPD activity in which consumers contribute to the content of a firm's offering. The main purpose of this study has been to investigate the non-participating consumers, i.e. the broad mass of people that do not actively participate in co-creation, and to explore how firms' future-oriented advertising of upcoming co-creative efforts affect their perceptions with regards to innovation ability and customer orientation. To fulfill this purpose, a quantitative experiment was conducted, revealing that pre-announced co-created products significantly enhance customer orientation perceptions as well as significantly weaken the perceptions of a firm's ability to be innovative. The results suggest that marketers may foster co-creation as an effective means to alter consumers' corporate associations.