You give your idea, they reciprocate, we judge - The triadic gift system behing non-participants' growing expectations toward empowering brands

PespiCo, Danone and Starbucks are examples of firms empowering their consumers for their new product development and their number is growing. Recent research highlighted that non-participants, representing the bulk of the brand audience, are sensitive to knowing that their brand appeals to consumers for developing their offer but their reactions are not always positive. A thorough understanding of the circumstances under which these (negative) effects occur and of how to attenuate them is therefore needed. To address this gap in the literature, we adopt a qualitative approach and we shed light on the unexpected and unwanted reactions from non-participants towards CES. Using gift-giving as a metaphor, we provide a thorough understanding of those reactions and propose a theory able to explain the mechanism behind, both for participants and non-participants in their exchanges with the brand.