“Appreciate me and i will be your good soldier”. The exploration of antecedents to consumer citizenship

Abstract

Customer citizenship behaviour (CCB) is an important consumer trend observed in the contemporary market. It may be described as an extra-role, voluntary behaviour performed in favour of other customers or companies. One of the CCB dimensions, namely, providing customer feedback to company offering, overlaps with value co-creation as a booming marketing concept. Our knowledge about factors determining this behaviour is relatively week. Trying to fill the gap, this paper discusses inclination for value co-creation among customers on the basis of literature review and explorative research. This explorative study aims to identify some company-related and customer-related antecedents to customer citizenship behaviour in the form of value co-creation in favour of companies. The theoretical deliberation is based on a critical literature review. The empirical part of the paper is based on explorative research in the form of a survey of 105 non-randomly selected customers. Aiming to identify the key drivers for customer inclination to participate in value co-creation, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted; next, the quality of factor structure was assessed with the help of SmartPLS 3.0 using standard measures of validity; and finally, structural links between the inclination to co-create and distinct antecedents were estimated using the partial least square structural equitation modelling technique (PLS_SEM). The factor analysis suggested distinguishing two aspects of customer co-creation, i.e., either initiated by companies (Organised Co-Creation) or by customers (Spontaneous Co-creation). The estimated PLS structural model shows that only some casual paths were found statistically significant, i.e., the appreciation showed by companies towards customers engaging in the organised co-creation process (as extrinsic motivation) and customer innovativeness, as well as the fulfilment of the need for stability (as intrinsic motivation) with regards to spontaneous co-creation. The ex-post moderation analysis with the help of the PLS_MGA algorithm enabled to identify gender as the factor potentially explaining inter-group differences in the structural model.

Keywords

• customer citizenship behaviour
• value co-creation
• appreciation
• gender