Customer Empowerment: An antecedent and a consequence of customer engagement in value co-creation

Abstract

For its numerous benefits, value co-creation has caught the interest of scholars and practitioners, as it has become a key approach for monitoring the customer-company relationship. Thus, the success of value co-creation relies on the willingness of the consumer to engage, alongside the company in this process, and requiring companies to rethink their innovation process by integrating the resources and skills of customers, as they no longer accept the passive role of simple recipients of marketing strategies. From now on they become empowered customers seeking to acquire more control and power in what makes sense in their interaction with the company and its offerings. Consisting of the delegation of power to the customer (Wright et al., 2006), customer empowerment has emerged as an extension of the postmodern movement that rejects the disconnection between consumption and production, and therefore represents an opportunity to co-create value with the customer. Drawing on the existing literature, this paper seeks to explore the concept of customer empowerment as both an antecedent and a result of customer engagement in value co-creation. We therefore propose a conceptual framework stressing the potential associations among psychological empowerment as a prerequisite and perceived empowerment as a consequence of customer engagement in value co-creation as well as their intention of future participation. The proposed framework also highlights the mediating effect of customer engagement in the connection between customer psychological empowerment and customer value co-creation behaviors, the moderating effect of customer creativity in the association of customers value co-creation behaviors and perceived empowerment, along with the mediating role of customers perceived task enjoyment among their perceived empowerment and their aspiration to participation in future value co-creation activities.