Empirical Study on Strategic Application of Co-creation Process: A Conceptual Framework to Effectively Collaborate With Customers

Co-creation occurs when companies collaborate with customers to understand their needs and expectations, thus creating an enhanced customer experience and generating more value for the customers. The paper provides a framework to understand the role of demographic variables in the co-creation process and the influence of co-creation on purchase decision making process, customer satisfaction level and brand loyalty. This paper first explores the relationship between demographic variable of customers and their interest towards collaborating with companies in the co-creation process. The second part establishes relationship between co-creation of a product, its influence on purchase decision making and increasing satisfaction and loyalty among customers. Also, the paper further establishes an understanding of the benefits that are a result of the co-creation process adopted by the company. For adopting the co-creation process, companies need to have a paradigm shift from their company-centric view of marketing to customer-centric view of marketing. The change is extremely demanding and companies have to transform their approach, structure and environment to engage customers in the co–creation process. This paper underlines the importance of taking demographic variables of the customer like age, gender, educational background, residing area, occupation and income into account for engaging them in the co-creation process.