Effects of Environmental and Social Sustainability Perceptions on Willingness to Co-Create from Consumer Perspective: An Abstract

In today’s business environment, companies face more challenges and competitions since the consumers have a voice in the business environment, and companies have to find out new ways to reach consumers, whereas consumers, in the current environment, could serve as collaborators, communicators, or competitors according to their interests (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2009). Therefore, customer value co-creation concept is adopted because it is a path to collaborate with consumers as well as to meet companies’ economic benefits (Vargo and Lusch 2004). In order to collaborate with customers, they listen to their brand communities and ask questions to customers in order to test their offerings (Füller et al. 2008; Gouillart 2014; Kozinets 2010; Kozinets et al. 2008). However, the customer’s willingness to co-create may have different reasons, such as social, hedonic, and ethical reasons (Carù and Cova 2015; Schau et al. 2009). In this connection, the co-creation process here is understood as a means to emphasize the social and ethical aspects, with consumers embracing the need to fulfil a social and ethical function in society. It means that consumers are increasingly seeking solutions to their own concerns and they are interested in creating a better world, guided by their moral values when making buying decisions (e.g., Hollenbeck and Zinkhan 2010). However, there is a lack of study on ethical motives such as environmental and social sustainability. Hence, this paper aims to find out whether consumer’s willingness to co-create may be affected by companies’ social and environmental practices. In this study, the social and exchange theory was applied (Thibaut and Kelley 1959). In order to measure cause-end-effect relationship between sustainability practices and willingness to co-create (Thomas 2011), a survey was conducted (n = 454) and respondents assessed environmental and social sustainability perceptions, and their willingness to co-create. Findings show that both environmental and social sustainability practices of companies have positive effects on consumers’ willingness to co-create.