Drivers of Brand Relationship in Co-Creation: The Role of Brand Engagement

摘要

Co-creation for brand innovation is an intriguing and rapidly growing trend in today's competitive market. Past research on consumer co-creation largely focus on addressing the economic value that consumer brings by participating in the production process (Zhao, and Calantone, 2003). Only limited research (Brodie et al., 2013) deals with the psychological effects of brand relationship under today's interactive platform such as co-creation. Furthermore, though past research indicates that interactive experience can produce engagement (Lusch and Vargo, 2010), however many brand co-creations fail to attract engaged participants and facilitate brand relationship (Gebauer, Fuller and Pezzei, 2012), a phenomenon that may be explained by the state of psychological drivers in the brand co-creation process. Therefore this suggests that brand engagement may play an important role in examining consumer brand relationship in co-creation. As a result an investigation into this knowledge gap is essential to shed light on how brand co-creation facilitates brand engagement. Present research adopts stimulus-organism-response (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974) paradigm and draws theoretical implications from self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1980) and implicit self-esteem theory (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995) to reveal the psychological effects of consumer co-creation on brand engagement which further affects consumer behaviors towards the brand.