The Impact of Different Customer Empowerment Strategies on Product Creativity and Purchase Intention

More and more companies see the added value of involving customers in certain business activities. Companies are therefore increasingly connecting with customers to generate promising ideas for new products. The active role of customers in new product development has become more feasible because the internet allows companies to build online communities. Through these communities, companies can listen to and integrate with customers from all over the world. Customer empowerment in new product development is conceptualized along two basic dimensions: customer empowerment to create (ideas for) new products, and; customer empowerment to select the products (designs) that will be produced, which leads to four different empowerment strategies, namely zero empowerment, create empowerment, select empowerment, and full empowerment. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of different customer empowerment strategies in new product development and the purchase intentions of observing customers. Moreover, the study investigates if the two main dimensions of creativity, namely perceived product novelty and perceived product meaningfulness mediate this relationship. The study also examines if these relationships differ between familiar versus unfamiliar brands. To test these relationships, an online experiment is conducted where a familiar and an unfamiliar brand of crisps, a popular product within the FMCG branch, are branded with different levels of customer empowerment in formulation of a new flavour. While the current literature finds significant effects of customer empowerment to create relative to zero empowerment, this study comprehensively examines the effects of all the empowerment strategies and finds that the four customer empowerment levels lead to no significant differences in purchase intention within the chosen product category. The results of the experiment also do not support the mediation effect of the two dimensions of product creativity and the moderation effect of brand familiarity. As expected, a positive significant effect of perceived product novelty and product meaningfulness on purchase intention is supported. Overall, this thesis combines different streams of research namely crowdsourcing, creativity, and branding, and outlines ideas for possible further research in this exciting area.