Participation and Customer Involvement

The previous chapter sought to chronicle the dynamic nature of community within the emerging technological environment. The chapter discussed how emerging computer-mediated marketing environments are intertwined with value co-creation. The current chapter examines customer participation and the level of customer involvement in OBCs. Managing an OBC is not just about attracting a large group of followers and sharing content and tools for followers to observe and use, it is also about understanding the meaning and role of customer participation and involvement. A key difference between customer participation and customer involvement is that participation refers to the actual activities conducted in OBCs, whereas involvement refers to the level of input individuals will invest into a community in the short and long term. Although the difference may seem minor, individuals’ actions and expression of attitudes or perspectives through OBCs signal their different levels of involvement in OBCs. One may argue that many online activities, such as sharing and observing content related to a brand, initiate momentary intentions to participate within OBCs, before moving on to the next or refreshed social media timeline. On average, individuals spend two hours per day using social media and the internet (Tankovska, 2021), which places pressure on firms to maintain customer participation in their OBCs within the relatively limited time period. Ensuring customers feel that visiting and participating in OBCs is a relevant part of their daily social media activity is challenging due to the highly diversified behavioural characteristics of customers (Ozuem et al., 2021). Typically, perceived shared outlooks, values and principles motivate customers to involve themselves in a community (Cheng et al., 2019) and become actors in shaping the brand’s image itself, extending a simple visit and observation of online activities into involvement (Carlson et al., 2019).