KOREASCHOLAR

Cewebrity is somebody who is only, or perhaps mostly famous through their presence on the Internet, an internet person who crosses over to the mainstream, so called web celebrity or Internet celebrity. Recognizing that Internet celebrities’ participation will bring about improvements of company performance, marketers have considered them to be new source of innovation dedicating to company’s success. For example, fashion companies believe that Internet celebrities have good innovation ideas on clothing collocation or even fashion design. Given the relevance of Internet celebrity in practice, researchers have begun to address its merits (Stever and Lawson, 2013). However, it is not yet a well-established field of academic inquiry, because Internet celebrity’s specific characteristics has not been well developed yet. Based on the nature of Internet celebrity as consumer, the theory of customer value co-creation is appropriate to explain these new generated celebrities’ activities in new product development. Activities of Internet celebrities in value co-creation can be shown as communication, idea conception, and product design (Genc and Benedetto, 2015). The current study mainly focuses on the effects of fashion internet celebrities on whole process of product development including product design, production, and commercialization by developing the scale of internet celebrity’s attributes under the perspective of customer value co-creation. Theoretically, the study fills up the research gap that no prior research develops the scales of Internet celebrity and test its effects on new product development. Practically, our work is highly useful for marketers understand the effects of Internet celebrity, thus developing appropriate strategies to utilize them.

• Hao Zhang(Northeastern University, China)
• Zhiqi Dong(Northeastern University, China)