Fostering the observing brand audience’s willingness-to-engage through the communication of co-creational efforts

Customer engagement in co-creating customer experience and value has raised growing interest in the past decade, both for scholars and professionals. PespiCo, McDonald’s, Lacoste are examples of firms developing online engagement platforms to co-create their new products with their customers and advertising them and more is to come. We design a between-subject experiment where we manipulate the firm’s philosophy (user-generated-idea vs firm-driven) and the product category. This research advances extant literature by showing that advertising co-created new products on social media can drive “willingness-to-engage” of the observing brand audience despite her non-participation. We empirically confirm recent research suggesting that engagement can be seen as a broader system. We also show that the impact of communicating a user-driven brand philosophy on non-participants’ willingness-to-engage is serially mediated by non-participants’ perceived empowerment and brand integrity