Research On The Consumer’s Online Participation Willingness Of Co-creation Activities In View Of Psychological Distance

Since the 21 st century, customers have begin to become more active participant in the creation of a product or service. With significant form of post-modern consumption awareness, more and more consumers show together with the enterprise’s ability to create personalized products or services. Enterprise managers gradually paid attention to the necessity and advantage of co-creation activities, and gradually paid attention to the role of consumers in the co-creation.Construal level theory proposes that people’s cognitive mental representation of objects has different levels of explanation, and the construal level depends on the perceived by people with psychological distance between the object distance, it then will affect people’s behavior. Combining with the current hotspot of psychological research-construal level theory, this article studies consumers’ willingness to participate in an act of co-creation based on the perspective of psychological distance. According to the academic researches on psychological distance, we propose that different dimensions of psychological distance(time, social, hypothetical distance) has a positive impact on consumers’ willingness to participate in co-creation activities.In the part of empirical research, this article divides the co-creation activity with a time point for intermediate point into unstarting co-creation activity and ongoing co-creation activity.In this study, we collect data by designing situational experiments and selecting eight different virtual communities respectively, then, make correlation analysis, single factor variance analysis, multiple regression analysis and regulation analysis by using the statistical software SPSS21. Through the empirical analysises, we test the effect of perceived psychological distance of consumers on the online willingness to participate in creating activities. Finally, the AMOS software is used to further verify the model.The following conclusions are:(1) For the unstarting activities, the farther of consumers perceived psychological distance(time distance, social distance, hypothetically), the lower willingness of consumers to participate in the activity online.(2) The farther of the time distance, the higher of consumers’ willingness to involve in the activity online.(3) The farther of the social distance closer, the lower willingness of consumers to participate in the activity online.(4) The greater the hypothetical(hypothetical dimension), the higher of consumers’ willingness to involve in the activity online.(5) The interaction effects of time distance, social distance and the hypothetical is not significant on consumers’ willingness to join the co-creation activity.(6) The higher the consumers’ willingness to participate in the co-creation activity, their willingness to purchase the products are higher.(7) The type of co-creation affects the effect of psychological distance on consumers’ willingness. It has the regulating effect.