Empowerment strategies and their effects in digital contexts: corroboration, replication, and extension

Since Fuchs and Schreier's (2010) foundational work on customer empowerment as a critical strategy for new product development and communication, scholars have proposed numerous features to help managers deploy effective empowerment campaigns in digitally-empowering contexts (Vollero, Schultz, and Siano 2019) Some researchers find that empowering customers to cooperate in selecting the product concepts to be marketed by the firm leads to a stronger demand for the underlying products because consumers develop a stronger feeling of psychological ownership of the products selected. This study replicates, refines, and extends this original research in three ways. We challenge previous findings by using more realistic scenarios (real brand) and more representative samples (adult population vs. students). We also investigate the effects of a new potential moderating variable (reward value), and we compare different empowerment strategies (empowerment-to-create and empowerment-to-select vs. zero empowerment) on two product categories, thus extending the customer empowerment research stream.