Exploring How Gamification Design Drives Customers’ Co-Creation Behavior in Taiwan

This study has incorporated the mechanics-dynamics-emotions (MDE) and two behavioral learning paths to investigate the customers’ co-creation behavior in Taiwan. The intuitive path begins with a gamification design that reflects the customers’ proactive and innovative behavior; the cognitive path begins with persuasion knowledge remarks based on rational and reactive reasoning. These two paths conclude what forms user co-creation. The study collects data of 505 active social media users in Taiwan and employs structural equation modeling. The empirical findings demonstrate persuasive knowledge and gamification design are significantly associated with self-reference, and in turn, positively associated with co-creation. It indicates that cognitive behavior plays the main role in forming co-creation. Participants are more drawn to co-creation behaviors by the marketing contents that prompt reactive behaviors than proactive ones. Therefore, marketing managers can use appropriate stimuli to enhance co-creation behavior. Companies can design activities related to users, and more accessible for reactive, instead of proactive behavior, i.e., asking for their initiatives. It also suggests that companies’ marketing campaigns should involve key opinion leaders matching the product image and the target audience’s preferences. The novelty of this study is to introduce a novel augmented MDE framework to extend the “dynamics” into the incubation and implementation stage.