Influences of customer participation and customer brand engagement on brand loyalty

Abstract

Purpose Value co-creation assumes that customers take active roles and create value together with firms. This paper aims to investigate the short- and long-term effects of customer participation on brand loyalty, through brand satisfaction. Participation effects were also examined among social media-using customers with the additional explanatory factor of brand engagement. Design/methodology/approach Two studies were conducted among insurance customers: a cross-sectional study using a nationwide sample (N = 954) and a subsample of social media users (N = 145) to examine short-term effects, and a longitudinal study using data from three assessment timepoints (N = 376) to enable empirical long-term testing. Findings The cross-sectional study showed positive short-term effects of customer participation on brand loyalty, mediated by satisfaction. Among customers using social media, positive participation effects gained from brand engagement strengthened brand satisfaction. The longitudinal study did not show similar positive long-term effects of customer participation. Practical implications These findings help deepen service marketers’ understanding of the possible short-term effects of customer participation and customer brand engagement, and caution them to not expect that customer participation will have long-term positive satisfaction and loyalty effects. Originality/value This research provides interesting short- and long-term findings, due to the complementary cross-sectional and longitudinal study designs.

The Effect of Participation Effort on CSR Participation Intention: The Moderating Role of Construal Level on Consumer Perception of Warm Glow and Perceived Costs

“…From the marketing perspective, companies use consumer participation as an effective strategic tool to drive positive consumer responses. Prior research demonstrates that companies can enhance satisfaction, trust, and loyalty by engaging consumers in production process [4,22,26]. In addition, consumer participation in CSR can lead to more positive responses by increasing their identification with the CSR activities compared to general CSR activities [5,27].…”

“…Participation effort refers to the degree to which consumers put efforts and resources into a production process [26]. Following prior works, we define participation effort as the degree of effort and resource input required from consumers to participate in companies' CSR activities.…”

Customer Attitudes Towards Participation and Health Data Sharing in the Digital Transformation of Finnish Insurance

“…Value co-creation has a strong focus on the roles of customers as active participants in the value creation process, and consider them resource integrators (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004;Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Customer participation in insurance contexts studied through the lens of value co-creation, has been shown to have a short-term positive effect on brand satisfaction and brand loyalty (Apenes Solem, 2016). Leading to positive effects on the motivation on employees, establishing that"... understanding how companies can harness the benefits of customer participation is of great importance."…”

“…Engaging their customers with their digital strategy may be a good first step towards this objective, as the survey revealed that a significant majority of customers lacked familiarity with the aforementioned strategy. As the value networks of an organization grow increasingly complex during a DT process, adopting agile customer-inclusive practices (Kettunen & Laanti, 2017) and developing ways to sustain the advantages of co-creation (Apenes Solem, 2016) may be critical to the success of a DT process. We believe that the customer perspective is a dimension of DT that stands to benefit the managerial practices and understanding of the field going forward.…”

Patients as strategic partners in hospital settings: Trust, participation, relational value, and loyalty

“…Behavioural loyalty, however, is a commitment to a service or brand despite the availability of competitive alternatives. [34] Given the local context of healthcare service provision, it is prudent to adopt a working definition of loyalty as a combination of patients' attitude and behaviour that translates into repurchase or regular use of service. Dong et al concluded that customer participation is positively related to service quality and satisfaction but has mixed impacts on future purchase intentions.…”