Proclaiming brand transparency: an effective strategy for advertising customer-ideated new products

Advertising new products as user-driven has proven to have impacts on brand evaluations even on people not present on the ideation platforms, namely the brand audience. The moderated mediation model presented in this research shows that when the brand process transparency is signalled next to “customer-ideated” in a new product advertisement, its effectiveness is enhanced. We also show how, namely by fostering the brand audience’s perceived brand integrity. Drawing on the signalling theory, we design two between-subject experiments. We first show, using fictive brands, that cueing brand transparency enhances the non-participating brand audience’s perceived empowerment. Second, this effect mediates positive outcomes with respect to non-participants’ trust in brand integrity. Third, the positive role of transparency in this relation generalizes both in case of high and low complexity product to design, contradicting extant literature. At last, using famous brands, we show that the initial level of brand integrity moderates these findings