Competing by Participation – A Winning Marketing Tool
Competing by Participation – A Winning Marketing Tool

Summary/Abstract: In the new media and communications context audiences are more empowered than ever to make their voices heard. Audiences, consumers are actively influencing the marketing activities of firms and brands. In the new dominant logic of marketing, firms are constrained to engage in complex processes of exchange with their consumers. To be able to keep up with the competition and media noise, it is crucial for companies to involve their audiences, potential consumers. Consumer participation in this context does not end with special attention for the brand, as companies turned to electronic word-of-mouth and other interactive messages concerning the company. Consumers themselves not only create advertisements and broadcast them in favour of or against organizations, they also create new products via a number of co-creative procedures and they are pushing the organizations to launch new pricing models. Therefore the scope of user-generated content is rather diverse from a marketing perspective. By generating an overview of the participation phenomenon in marketing and marketing communications literature, this article endeavours to reconcile the related taxonomy used in the business and marketing literature by an extended summary and explanation of the key terms. This will allow us to conclude that the most important central theme of the very diverse literature of audience participation lies in the fact that it is inspired, facilitated, established or maintained by the participating corporation as a core element. As such, participating corporations manage to extract a source of additional satisfaction and thus an added value that in a long term can be transformed into a competitive advantage.

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