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.