Conference Proceeding

Non-Participants and Brands' Communication of Co-Creational Efforts: A Matter of Trust

Cambier, Fanny, Poncin, Ingrid

2017

Overview

Today, more and more firms develop customer empowerment strategies (CES) to empower their customers in ideation or selection of new product developments. Research in that field has mostly focused so far on customers actively participating to CES. Another influential and bigger group might be studied: the brand audience as a whole, not participating to the initiatives. With this research, we examine effectiveness conditions of CES-communication to the non-participants. More specifically, we highlight reasons for non-participants to be sceptical. We here suggest that brand trust is a central concept after exposure to CES-communication, especially in the current context of greater suspicion toward brands. If the ultimate objective of marketing is to create and nurture a long-term relationship between consumers and companies, trust constitutes the main ingredient of this relationship. This research offers noteworthy theoretical insights and practical implications. First, we contribute to a still scarce literature and show the importance of non-participants' trust toward the empowering brands. We imply that initiating and communicating customer empowerment may help foster brand trust, if the brand publicly shows they gave feedback and observed transparency all along the process.

• Publisher: Association for Consumer Research
• Subject: Brands / Consumer behavior / Customer services / Marketing / Trust