With a little help from my customers: the influence of customer empowerment on consumers' perceptions of well-established brands

Labelling product innovations as designed and/or selected by customers can positively affect non-participating consumers' self-stated behavioural intentions, that is, it can increase the probability of purchasing that product. Most previous studies have used fictitious brands to test the aforementioned effect, raising concerns about the degree to which these findings are relevant for marketing practice. Brand managers thus might wonder whether labelling product innovations as user-designed and/or user-selected might indeed increase sales for their well-established brands. This paper addresses this research gap by investigating the possible effects of three alternative strategies for labelling innovations (i.e., empowerment-to-select, empowerment-to-create, and full empowerment) for two well-established technology brands. For all three strategies and both brands, we find that involving customers significantly increases the perceived innovation ability, which then positively mediates the effect on behavioural intentions. However, due to a negative direct effect, only labelling products as selected by customers has an overall positive effect.