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1. Introduction
Online users are a potential source of creative contributions to virtual design (Nambisan, 2002; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). By involving customers in product design, firms can enhance the symbolic value of their products (Fuchs et al., 2013) and better meet customer needs. For example, one study showed that buyers were more attracted to a T-shirt inspired by user-generated ideas than to a T-shirt designed by an NPD (Nishikawa et al., 2013). Another showed that customers were more attracted to a design when they knew the identity of the designer (Fuchs and Schreier, 2011; Moreau and Herd, 2010). Although practitioners and researchers are focusing on the new form of customer value co-creation, their studies have had several limitations.
First, there are limited studies about consumer value co-creation in luxury goods. Value co-creation is beneficial, but value co-creation has not been fully applied to the luxury industry (Fuchs and Schreier, 2011). Second, the prior studies lack consensus regarding how to measure value co-creation. Studies using single indicators find it difficult to measure all types of co-creation behaviors. For example, information sharing was a highly compact behavior (Yi and Gong, 2013) or viewed as a low co-creation behavior (Fang, 2008). Third, value co-creation activities can be unsatisfactory in the luxury industry because customers do not have full understandings on specific luxury attributes. Hence, it is necessary to further explore the dimension of value co-creation and its performance in the luxury field.
Therefore, this study addresses the mentioned research gaps and provides a comprehensive understanding of customer value co-creation. We develop a new two-dimensional measurement scale and proposed a theory-based conceptual model by focusing on the depth and strength of co-creation activities: idea innovativeness and behavior intensity. We conduct three studies in terms of consumer participation in the co-ideation, co-design and co-development process to explore the mediating effect of psychological distance in the relationship between value co-creation on product symbolic design (study 1, study 2) and to examine the moderating role of peer feedback (study 3). The study contributes to literature by advancing theoretical grounds for value co-creation, interactive marketing and customer relationship management and providing managerial insight into the implementation of product design activities in the luxury industry.
2. Literature review
2.1 Value co-creation