Are All Customer Empowerment Strategies Equally Beneficial? A Relative Efficacy and Issue of the Campaign Accounts: An Abstract

Managerial practices of consumer empowerment are increasingly used by companies from consumer goods sector. Since Fuchs and Schreier’s (2011) foundational works on customer empowerment as a critical strategy for new product development, numerous features have been advanced by scholars to help managers deploy effective empowerment campaigns. These authors have distinguished two types of strategies: empowerment-to-create, which enables customers to submit ideas for new products; and empowerment-to-select, which relies on consumers’ votes to choose products, which will ultimately be marketed. Although academics addressed strong results about conditions of consumer empowerment strategies effectiveness, market research has yet to fully assess relative efficacy (create vs. select) of empowerment strategies on brand variables (word of mouth, brand attitude, etc.). Furthermore, identification of critical situational variables (e.g., the introduction of the rewards effect) remains incomplete and therefore deserves further study. Our empirical findings suggest that managers of consumer goods should refine their empowerment strategies characteristics while implementing them. When companies’ objectives behind empowerment strategies are an enhancement of word-of-mouth toward the brand, performing empowerment to create designs appears more advantageous for companies than empowerment to select. However, coming up with empowerment to select contests is more interesting for companies that want to improve the other behavioral indicators (brand attitude, purchase intention) as they are less expensive and easier to implement as empowerment to create strategies. Then, we show that losing or winning the campaign (and therefore financial reward) for participating customers who take part into empowerment managerial practices does not make a significant difference in terms of impact on brand performance metrics. Our results that did not conclude about dependent variables enhancement in the case of gain suggest that the communication of the outcome of the campaign to the consumer whether it is favorable or unfavorable does not significantly improve the effectiveness of these innovation challenges. Extending recent developments, this research is giving directions for an effective crafting of crowdsourcing strategies and a sustainable contests participation.