The effectiveness of customer engagement in co-creation: the moderating role of customer personality traits

As marketing strategies and customers' needs change, organisations should listen to the customer’s voice as the customer can play a huge role in the firm’s innovation activities to maintain business growth and enhance competitive advantage. Recent developments in marketing have shed light on the blurred outlines between organisations and customers. Contemporary thinking in the field has found that the co-creation process has moved from the firm viewpoint to the customer viewpoint and it has also been observed that customers have become more active and now play a central role when collaborating with the firm in co-creation procedures (Lusch and Vargo, 2014; Merz et al., 2018; Vargo and Lusch, 2016). Yet, scholars and researchers lack understanding of how customer engagement contributes to the co-creation process. Thus, drawing on social exchange theory and service-dominant logic, a conceptual framework for this study is built and seeks to explain how engaging customers in the co-creation process can affect new product success. The inquiry extends to examine the impact of customer personality traits (personalisation, shopping enjoyment, social affiliation, social recognition and preferential treatment) as moderating factors that influence the relationship between customer engagement and co-creation.
This research adopts a quantitative strategy to understand the relationships between the research concepts. A printed questionnaire was used to collect data from customers in jewellery stores in London. The questionnaires were distributed among 310 customers who were collaborating with the jewellers in a co-creation process. Following data collection, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was employed in the analysis. The key findings resulting from this research were that the effect of customer engagement on customer co-creation is positive and statistically significant so firms can benefit from their customers by engaging them in the value creation process by obtaining information and feedback ; firms can also benefit from customer skills and ideas. In addition, co-creation has a positive impact on new product success; the important role that customers play and their participation in the new product development process help companies to satisfy their needs and improve performance in new product development. Furthermore, the moderators which moderate the relationship between customer engagement and customer co-creation consist of five customer personality traits. All of these constructs were supported statistically and theoretically. Contrary to the hypothesis, two of them were not confirmed (social affiliation and personalisation) which means social affiliation and personalisation negatively moderated the effect of customer engagement on customer co-creation.
The research makes a contribution both on a theoretical and a practical level. On a theoretical level, the conceptual framework developed in this study contributes to more theoretical development in the growing field of customer engagement in co-creation. The researcher connects customer engagement (CE) with customer co-creation (CCO) and offers a coherent framework that determines the moderators that affect this relationship and the consequence of this connection on new product success from a customer perspective. In other words, it provides a better understanding of the relationship between CE and co-creation which leads to new product success (NPS). On a practical level, this study highlights the customer personality traits that marketers should understand in order to encourage the customer to integrate with the new product development process and it confirms the outcome of their engagement in the co-creation process in producing a successful new product. Moreover, it illustrates the opportunity that has been given to customers to engage and interact with organisations, it allows the marketers to look at customers as a resource for co-creation to help the company with future decision-making and decrease new product failure so that it can benefit from the interaction between them to satisfy customers, meet their needs, generate ideas and reach its business goals by engaging them in new product procedures at the same time.