Building Brand Love Through Co-creation

Abstract

The last few years, the concept of co-creation emerges as central for both academia and industry (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder 2011). Despite the undeniable importance of this topic, the investigation of co-creation’s role in building strong brands in the literature is limited. More precisely although there is some research investigating the role of co-creation in branding issues (e.g. Payne et al. 2009; Tynan et al. 2010; Bello et al. 2007), the impact of co-creation on consumer’s love for a brand remains unexplored. This conceptual paper is a first effort to build the theoretical grounds for the relationship between co-creation and brand love. More specifically, we examine how co-creation affects various dimensions of brand love, as they have been conceptualized by Batra et al. (2012). At the same time, we provide some first theoretical insights on how co-creation can indirectly positively influence brand love through other constructs such as product quality and brand personality.