An Exploration of Effects of Launching Empowerment Strategies by Brands for Participating Customers: An Abstract

In the past decade, numerous international brands as Lay’s (Frito-Lay), Dop (L’oréal), Danette (Danone) have all embraced consumer empowerment strategies relying on consumers for new product development in consumer goods sector in France. Consumer empowerment, through managerial strategies, is defined as « a strategy that firms use to give customers a sense of control over a company’s product selection process, allowing them to collectively select final products the company will later sell to the broader market » (Fuchs et al. 2010, p. 65). These authors have distinguished two types of strategies: empowerment-to-create which enable customers to submit ideas for new products and empowerment-to-select which rely on consumers votes to choose products that will ultimately be marketed. On the one hand, with the advent of Internet technologies, brands are increasingly deploying empowerment campaigns through dedicated platforms or facebook pages taking advantage of communicational and innovation opportunities enabled by these practices implementation. On the other hand, marketing scholars studying consumer empowerment theme (Dahl et al. 2015; Fuchs et al. 2010) have addressed several positive effects for companies launching empowerment strategies on various performance indicators (brand attitude, word-of-mouth, purchase intention). However, it appears when reviewing the actual literature that while both empowerment strategies effects on various companies’ brand equity metrics have been documented, comparison between empowerment to create and empowerment to select effectiveness didn’t get attention while it has a significant importance for managers when deploying marketing actions in a context of pressure on return on investment. Our research is building on avenues of research gaps introduced by Fuchs et Schreier (2011; p.29). More specifically, this research aims at empirically examine (1) benefits retrieved by participants to empowerment campaigns (2) comparison between empowerment to create and to select effects as perceived by both participating and non-participating consumers (3) behavioral attitudes arising from participation to these campaigns and changes induced in terms of the perception of brands launching such initiatives. To answer to these questions, we’ve adopted a qualitative approach aiming at answering to research objectives and combining three series of in-depth interviews (see Annex 1 for profile description of respondents). This research combines a total of 24 interviews conducted with participating consumers (N = 9) that were involved in empowerment campaigns, projective interviews (N = 7) and interviews with non-participant consumers (N = 8). Results show that both participating and non-participating consumers prefer empowerment to create strategies as they are more opened and they enable consumers’ freedom of speech letting consumers themselves more than empowerment to select. Consumers discourse analysis also shows that they prefer empowerment to select comparing to create when they feel they don’t have the sufficient skills or expertise.