Know your perceived expertise! : how to foster future sales strategies with stakeholder co-creation by the example of complex products

• Autor(a) principal: Bosnjak, Marina
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25926
• topic: Co-creation; Product innovation; Perceived expertise; Behavior intention; Brand perception; Labeling; Millennials; Complex products; Cocriação; Inovação de produto; Perceção de conhecimento; Intenção de comportamento; Perceção da marca; Rotulagem; Produtos complexos; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Compared to other generations Millennials are relatively little loyal to brands but search for brands and products that suit their lifestyle and character. Hence, it is crucial for managers to know how to gain their attention and what convinces them to purchase and recommend. The present research investigates Millennials’ attitude towards stakeholder co-creation. Namely brand perceptions and behavioral intentions are investigated. Whereas former studies of co-creation mainly focused on investigating user co-creation, this study compares the out-come of communicating products as co-created by stakeholders with different perceived lev-els of expertise for complex products. Moreover, it aims to analyze the mediating effect of co-actors’ perceived expertise, which predicts Millennials’ behavioral intentions. The hypotheses are tested in a single factor, independent group, between-subjects experiment, using three levels of perceived expertise for the factor co-actor and one control group repre-senting generic design. The data was collected with an online questionnaire on Qualtrics, quantifying respondents’ perception of brand uniqueness, innovation ability, and their inten-tions to buy and recommend. The findings indicate that brands, offering complex products, which are labeled as co-created, are perceived as more innovative and unique than brands with generic design. At the same time those perceptions partially influence behavioral intentions. Interestingly, results reveal that expertise is a mediator of behavioral intentions. Thus, the study suggests to managers that knowing Millennial consumers’ perception about the expertise level of co-actors is crucial for the success of communication strategies.