Deterrents to co-creation online

Resum

Value co-creation is an important topic of interest in marketing domain for the last decade. Co-creation via the Internet has received a particular attention in the literature (O'Hern & Rindfleisch, 2010; Rathore, Ilavarasan, & Dwivedi, 2016). Although there have been substantive number of studies of what motivates customers to participate in value co-creation in the Internet-based platforms (Fuller, 2006; Constantinides, Brünink, & Lorenzo-Romero, 2015; Nambisan & Baron, 2009), there is a lack of research of what the deterrents are that may prevent customers from contributing their ideas on-line. First, the qualitative research based on twenty in-depth interviews with customers and twenty in-depth interviews with marketing specialists from different companies was undertaken in order to define the deterrents from the customers’ and companies’ point of view, as a basis for future survey to be delivered to the customers. The results show that although there is a repetition of the mentioned constraining factors indicated by the both groups of the interviewees, the ranking of the barriers is distinctive. Second, up-to-date there is no study that would empirically measure the effect that the deterrents have on the users’ attitude towards co-creation online. Therefore, the second study is aimed not only to fill up the mentioned literature gap, but also provide additional value to the academia and practitioners by determining the effect of the context, age, gender, and education level performing multigroup analysis. PLS-SEM approach is applied in order to answer the research questions. Finally, the third study is built on the theoretical background of the previous chapter and is aimed to extend the implications for the practitioners and academia by not only adding moderating effects of perceived risk of use, brand reputation, and mediation effect of brand trust; but also by testing the advanced model performing multigroup analysis using context and previous experience in co-creation as the control variables. Based on the research findings, the thesis’s main theoretical contribution is the definition and analysis of the deterrents to co-create in an online environment. From a managerial implications perspective, the thesis provides practical marketing solutions for the development of co-creation strategies online considering targeted users’ age, gender, educational level, and previous experience with co-creation.