The importance of customers’ brand evaluation has been recognized in the marketing literature for years. Brand evaluation can affect not only consumer behaviors but also a firm’s competitive advantage. The research on the antecedents of brand evaluation has mainly focused on the effects of individual marketing variables, such as pricing, brand awareness, and word-of-mouth, on brand evaluation, and ignored the effect of strategies, such as customer empowerment. Customer empowerment is an emerging marketing paradigm that shifting decision power of designing and selecting power from firms to customers.
The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between customer em-powerment and brand evaluation, and the moderating effect of product involvement on the aforesaid relationship. Study 1 is a pilot study, with an aim to selecting appropriate clothing styles as research objects and the appropriate price level as a control variable. Study 2 uses a 2 (customer empowerment: high vs. low) × 2 (price: high vs. low) between-subjects factorial design in order to investigate the hypothesis that customer empowerment is positively related to brand evaluation and the moderating role of product involvement.
The response rate is 48.8%. The results show that customer empowerment is sig-nificantly and positively related to brand evaluation, and product involvement is a negative moderator of the aforementioned relationship.
