Consumer suggestion sharing : helpful, pragmatic and conditional

Purpose: Consumers who share their suggestions with firms contribute valuable knowledge and both exhibit and reinforce positive customer engagement. Yet, the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm customer suggestion sharing remain understudied. This study aims to investigate how potential self, other customer and firm benefits motivate consumer suggestion sharing. Design/methodology/approach: A critical incident pretest explores the domain and establishes ecological validity. Two scenario-based experimental studies test the proposed relationships in distinct service contexts. Findings: Results support a prosocial (helpful) view of suggestion sharing – potential benefits to other customers motivate suggestion sharing. Potential benefits for the firm play two roles, namely, they indirectly motivate suggestion sharing by increasing consumers’ perceived outcome expectancy, illustrating a pragmatic mechanism, and they directly motivate suggestion sharing when service quality is high, illustrating a conditional, reciprocity-driven mechanism. When service quality is low, consumers are less likely to share firm-benefitting suggestions and more likely to share non-beneficial suggestions, highlighting a potential low service quality “trap” in which firms can become stuck. Research limitations/implications: Future research is needed to study the antecedents of attitude toward suggestion sharing and the effect of relationship strength on suggestion sharing. Practical implications: Managerially, multiple paths are identified by which firms can motivate suggestion sharing. The low-service quality “trap” indicates that low-service quality firms should not rely on, and should perhaps even ignore, customer suggestions as a tool for improving their offerings. Originality/value: By experimentally investigating the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm consumer suggestion sharing, this paper fills a gap in extant research and provides a foundation upon which future suggestion sharing research can build.