A Conceptual Review on Motivations of Consumers towards Co- Creation related to New Product Development

Abstract

Active consumer engagement in the new product development stage has gained the spotlight due its ability to drill down the consumers’ needs and design market offerings, which satisfy the consumers. Hence, the consumer’s role has changed to a “prosumer” by combining the role of the producer as well as the consumer. In light of this, the concept of co-creation has evolved and subsequently gained attention of the researchers. However, it is questionable why consumers are simulated to engage in co-creation. This paper therefore is intended to provide a critical evaluation of literature on the motivational factors towards the consumer engagement in co-creation during the new product development stage. A rigorous literature review is carried out by choosing both conceptual and empirical papers mostly published after 2005 in reputed journals in order to critically evaluate the motivational factors discussed by many authors. Based on the content analysis consumer related factors as well as firm related factors are identified as the motivators of consumers towards engaging in co-creation. Subsequently, customer related motivators are financial rewards, social benefits, technological factors, hedonic factors and altruistic factors, which can be divided as explicit and implicit factors based on the visibility and explicit nature. Nevertheless, invitation from the company and ethics of the company are identified as the firm related motivators. Summarizing all these factors a model is presented to extend the research into a conceptual domain