How Brand Empowerment Strategies Affect Consumer Behavior: From the Psychological Ownership Perspective: An Abstract

Abstract

In response to the increasing demand for consumer empowerment, marketers are paying attention to an empowerment strategy where consumers take part in producing a product or service (Fuchs et al. 2010). This study aims to examine: (1) how different empowerment strategies have varying effects on product attitude and (2) if psychological ownership mediates the effectiveness of empowerment strategies in the context of a brand’s new product development. In the context of co-production, two commercial types of empowerment strategy exist: (1) an empowerment-to-create tactic that offers opportunities for consumers to design products and (2) an empowerment-to-select tactic that invites consumers to make a choice among many alternatives. In contrast, a non-empowerment tactic let consumers make a choice within given options offered by the brand (Bachouche and Sabri-Zaaraoui 2017). Firm performance enhances as consumer involvement in the product development decision-making process increases (Bachouche and Sabri 2017). H1. The empowerment-to-create strategy most effectively increases product attitudes, followed by the empowerment-to-select strategy and then the non-empowerment strategy. Psychological ownership theory asserts that an individual can develop a psychological bond with a target object and such feelings of possessiveness influence their subsequent reactions (Fuchs et al. 2010). Previous work showed that empowerment causes beneficial outcomes through stronger psychological ownership (Fuchs et al. 2010). H2. Psychological ownership mediates the effect of an empowerment strategy on product attitude. A web-based experiment (N = 177) was conducted using a single factor between-subject design (empowerment strategies: empowerment-to-create vs. empowerment-to-select vs. non-empowerment). The one-way ANOVA results confirmed that the effect of empowerment strategies on product attitude was significant (F(2, 174) = 12.46, p