Factors Influencing Consumer-generated Content In Value Co-creation From Social Embeddedness Perspectives

The process of co-creation has changed with the development of the society.Service-dominant logic emphasized that consumers are the value co-creators.Due to the rapid development of Web 2.0 technology,the Internet has changed how people communicate.Increasing numbers of customers generate their content in online cocreation communities and this co-creation between customers and companies has become a fashion trend.With the current trend of co-creation,companies and consumers increasingly take advantage of online co-creation communities to share and exchange product-related information.However,there are littler researches focus on co-creation in China.In response to the research gap of online co-creation,we advance the theoretical understanding of consumer co-creation from a social embeddedness perspective.This study explored the co-creation activities between companies and consumers in the online co-creation platform owned by the company from a social embeddedness perspective.Specifically,investigating co-creation from structural embeddedness perspective,relational embeddedness perspective and resource embeddedness perspective,respectively.There are both consumer to consumer and consumer to employee interaction in the online co-creation platform,so we also considered the effect of employee participation.Firstly,based on social network theory,this study explored how a consumer's network positions in the friendship-based network influences the consumer's contributions to online co-creation.Using panel data collected from MIUI online cocreation community in mainland China,we calculate the centrality measures.We found strong evidence for the suggested influence of network positions on contribution behavior.Specifically,we proved that a consumer's degree centrality and closeness centrality had positive effects on contributions to online co-creation.However,there was a negative relationship between consumer's betweenness centrality and contributions to online co-creation.Moreover,this study investigated the relationship between social embeddedness and customer-generated content and how participation of employees moderated this relationship.To analyze social embeddedness,we focused on structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness.This study using objective data collected from the MIUI online co-creation community in China,including the number of friends,the number of posts and employee participation.The results indicated that both structural and relational embeddedness positively impact customer-generated content and employee participation negatively moderates the relationship between structural embeddedness and customer-generated content.Employee participation has no moderation effect between relational embeddedness and customer-generated content.Thirdly,based on social capital theory,we developed a research model to examine the factors influencing the popularity of customer-generated content using objective data collected from the MIUI online co-creation community in China.We proved that both norm of reciprocity and shared language have positive effect on the popularity of customer-generated content.A key result of this study is that social networks ties among consumers enable the norm of reciprocity and shared language,which in turn influence the popularity of customer-generated content.This study broadens our understanding about co-creation between companies and consumers,provides a new research perspective and adds new research content and methods.This study also broadens our understanding about social embeddedness theory.We provides suggestions to company managers and online co-creation platform directors as well.